She represented a new, different, wild form of beauty. Before Brigitte Bardot Female film stars were unattainable creatures who floated over gala steps in robes. Bardot, on the other hand, hopped, jumped and danced across the screen in light clothing, across the red carpets of the world and of life. She fed the cameras a sexual charisma that was confusingly natural. From Japan to New York, women suddenly wore flat shoes and copied Bardot’s “sauerkraut hairstyle,” which looked as if she had just gotten out of bed. Bardot was the answer to the stiffness of the 1950s; it represented a new physicality. Simone de Beauvoir celebrated Bardot as a symbol of female freedom, the writer Marguerite Duras crowned her “Queen Bardot”, and in 1969 BB was the first actress to become the face of the national symbolic figure Marianne, whose corresponding bust stood in all town halls in the country. She was France’s biggest star. And it still is today.