The husband of French screen legend Brigitte Bardot has revealed that the actress underwent two cancer operations before her death last month at the age of 91.
In an interview with Paris Match published ahead of her funeral on Wednesday, Bardot’s husband, Bernard d’Ormale, said his wife ‘had tolerated very well the two procedures she underwent to treat the cancer that took her.’
It was believed at the time that Bardot died weeks after undergoing surgery and battling a ‘sudden illness.’
She passed away at her home in Saint-Tropez, the seaside town that became inseparable from her public image and private retreat after she abandoned filmmaking in the early 1970s.
Until now, no official cause of death had been disclosed.
The news of Bardot’s death, who became an international symbol of sensuality and cinematic rebellion after her breakthrough in And God Created Woman, was met with an outpouring of tributes globally.
The new details emerged as mourners gathered in Saint-Tropez to pay their respects, with a church service and burial marking the final farewell to one of France’s most recognisable cultural figures.
The funeral is expected to be deliberately understated, reflecting Bardot’s long-standing wish for privacy in later life.
D’Ormale also said in an interview today that his wife had no time for President Emmanuel Macron’s administration.
In an interview with Le Parisien, D’Ormale said she always stuck to her political principles.
‘Tributes weren’t her thing,’ he said. ‘She received the Legion of Honour, but she never went to collect it.’
Many politicians wanted a day of national mourning for the former actress and pop singer, but d’Ormale said: ‘We told them to get lost.’
Neither Macron nor his wife, Brigitte Macron, will be in St Tropez forBardot’s funeral at the Church of Our Lady of the Assumption in St Tropez.
Instead her old friend Marine Le Pen, preidential candidate for the far-Right National Rally (NR) party will be the most senior politician there.
D’Ormale is a former advisor to her late father, the founder of the NR, when it was called the Front National.
Describing her last hours, he said: ‘They were the most moving moment of my life with Brigitte, because she was leaving us.
‘She said ‘”pew pew”. I was half asleep, I sat up and saw that she had stopped breathing.
‘I saw her suffering disappear in the next fifteen minutes – she became magnificent.
‘I hope the French will remember her generosity, her character, but also, and especially, her work for animal rights.’
In the years leading up to her death, Bardot suggested she would be buried among her multiple pets, who had names such as Sidonie the Goat, Bonhomme the Donkey, and Poupée the Pony.
But she will instead be buried at the Marine Cemetery in St Tropez, close to the grave of her first husband, the director Roger Vadim, who died in 2000, aged 72.
In 1984, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and refused chemotherapy, opting for radiation treatment instead, successfully going into remission in 1986.
She also suffered from severe arthritis, which often required her to use walking sticks.
Bardot made 45 films in all and recorded 70 songs as a pop singer before retiring from public life in 1973.
In her later life, her far-Right politics became increasingly controversial, and she was convicted and fined six times for inciting racial hatred, particularly against immigrants and Muslims, and residents of the French overseas territory of Réunion, whom she called ‘degenerate savages.’
Bardot was married four times – to Vadim between 1952 and 1957, Jacques Charrier between 1959 and 1962, Gunter Sachs (1966-1969), and she married D’Ormale in 1992.
She also had a number of other high-profile relationships, including with the singer Serge Gainsbourg.
Bardot had one son, Nicholas-Jacques Charrier, now 65, with Jacques Charrier.
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