Brigitte Bardot, the French 1960s sex symbol who became one of the greatest screen sirens of the 20th century and later a militant animal rights activist and far-right supporter, has died. She was 91.

Bardot died Sunday (Dec. 28) at her home in southern France, according to Bruno Jacquelin, of the Brigitte Bardot Foundation for the protection of animals. Speaking to The Associated Press, he gave no cause of death, and said that no arrangements had been made for funeral or memorial services. She had been hospitalized last month.

Bardot became an international celebrity as a sexualized teen bride in the 1956 movie And God Created Woman. Directed by then husband Roger Vadim, it triggered a scandal with scenes of the long-legged beauty dancing on tables naked.

At the height of a cinema career that spanned more than two dozen films and three marriages, Bardot came to symbolize a nation bursting out of bourgeois respectability. Her tousled, blond hair, voluptuous figure and pouty irreverence made her one of France’s best-known stars, even as she struggled with depression.

Though her fame derived from her on-screen image, Bardot contributed as a vocalist to a number of studio recordings: the Et Dieu… Créa la Femme soundtrack (1956), Brigitte Bardot Sings (1963), B.B. (1964), Bonnie and Clyde with Serge Gainsbourg (1968) and Show (1968). Bonnie and Clyde featured the Gainsbourg-penned song of the same name, a French-language performance with Bardot and Gainsbourg telling the story of the outlaw couple.

Such was Bardot’s widespread appeal that in 1969 her features were chosen to be the model for “Marianne,” the national emblem of France and the official Gallic seal. Bardot’s face appeared on statues, postage stamps and coins.

‘’We are mourning a legend,’’ French President Emmanuel Macron said in an X post.

Bardot’s second career as an animal rights activist was equally sensational. She traveled to the Arctic to blow the whistle on the slaughter of baby seals. She also condemned the use of animals in laboratory experiments, and she opposed Muslim slaughter rituals.

“Man is an insatiable predator,” Bardot told The Associated Press on her 73rd birthday, in 2007. “I don’t care about my past glory. That means nothing in the face of an animal that suffers, since it has no power, no words to defend itself.”

Her activism earned her compatriots’ respect and, in 1985, she was awarded the Legion of Honor, the nation’s highest recognition.

Later, however, she fell from public grace as her animal protection diatribes took on a decidedly extremist tone. She frequently decried the influx of immigrants into France, especially Muslims.

She was convicted and fined five times in French courts of inciting racial hatred, in incidents inspired by her opposition to the Muslim practice of slaughtering sheep during annual religious holidays.

Bardot’s 1992 marriage to fourth husband Bernard d’Ormale, a onetime adviser to far-right National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, contributed to her political shift. She described Le Pen, an outspoken nationalist with multiple racism convictions of his own, as a “lovely, intelligent man.”

In 2012, she supported the presidential bid of Marine Le Pen, who now leads her father’s renamed National Rally party. Le Pen paid homage Sunday to an “exceptional woman” who was “incredibly French.”

In 2018, at the height of the #MeToo movement, Bardot said in an interview that most actors protesting sexual harassment in the film industry were “hypocritical,” because many played “the teases” with producers to land parts.

She said she had never had been a victim of sexual harassment and found it “charming to be told that I was beautiful or that I had a nice little ass.”

Brigitte Anne-Marie Bardot was born Sept. 28, 1934, to a wealthy industrialist. A shy child, she studied classical ballet and was discovered by a family friend who put her on the cover of Elle magazine at age 14.

Bardot once described her childhood as “difficult” and said that her father was a strict disciplinarian who would sometimes punish her with a horse whip.

Vadim, a French movie producer whom she married in 1952, saw her potential and wrote And God Created Woman to showcase her provocative sensuality, an explosive cocktail of childlike innocence and raw sexuality.

The film, which portrayed Bardot as a teen who marries to escape an orphanage and then beds her brother-in-law, had a decisive influence on New Wave directors Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, and came to embody the hedonism and sexual freedom of the 1960s.

The film was a box-office hit, and it made Bardot a superstar. Her girlish pout, tiny waist and generous bust were often more appreciated than her talent.

“It’s an embarrassment to have acted so badly,” Bardot said of her early films. “I suffered a lot in the beginning. I was really treated like someone less than nothing.”

Bardot’s unabashed, off-screen love affair with co-star Jean-Louis Trintignant eradicated the boundaries between her public and private life and turned her into a hot prize for paparazzi.

Bardot never adjusted to the limelight. She blamed the constant media attention for the suicide attempt that followed 10 months after the birth of her only child, Nicolas. Photographers had broken into her house two weeks before she gave birth to snap a picture of her pregnant.

Nicolas’ father was Jacques Charrier, a French actor who married Bardot in 1959 but who never felt comfortable in his role as Monsieur Bardot. Bardot soon gave up her son to his father, and later said she had been chronically depressed and unready for the duties of being a mother.

“I was looking for roots then,” she said in an interview. “I had none to offer.”

In her 1996 autobiography Initiales B.B., she likened her pregnancy to “a tumor growing inside me,” and described Charrier as “temperamental and abusive.”

Bardot married her third husband, West German millionaire playboy Gunther Sachs, in 1966, and they divorced three years later.

Among her films were A Parisian (1957); In Case of Misfortune, in which she starred in 1958 with screen legend Jean Gabin; The Truth (1960); Private Life (1962); A Ravishing Idiot (1964); Shalako (1968); Women (1969); The Bear and the Doll (1970); Rum Boulevard (1971); and Don Juan (1973).

With the exception of 1963’s critically acclaimed Contempt, directed by Godard, Bardot’s films were rarely complicated by plots. Often they were vehicles to display Bardot in scanty dresses or frolicking nude in the sun.

“It was never a great passion of mine,” she said of filmmaking. “And it can be deadly sometimes. Marilyn [Monroe] perished because of it.”

Bardot retired to her Riviera villa in St. Tropez at the age of 39 in 1973 after The Woman Grabber. As fans brought flowers to her home Sunday, the local St. Tropez administration called for “respect for the privacy of her family and the serenity of the places where she lived.”

She emerged a decade after retirement with a new persona: An animal rights lobbyist, her face was wrinkled and her voice was deep following years of heavy smoking. She abandoned her jet-set life and sold off movie memorabilia and jewelry to create a foundation devoted exclusively to the prevention of animal cruelty.

Depression sometimes dogged her, and she said that she attempted suicide again on her 49th birthday.

Her activism knew no borders. She urged South Korea to ban the sale of dog meat and once wrote to U.S. President Bill Clinton asking why the U.S. Navy recaptured two dolphins it had released into the wild.

She attacked centuries-old French and Italian sporting traditions including the Palio, a free-for-all horse race, and campaigned on behalf of wolves, rabbits, kittens and turtle doves.

“It’s true that sometimes I get carried away, but when I see how slowly things move forward … my distress takes over,” Bardot told the AP when asked about her racial hatred convictions and opposition to Muslim ritual slaughter.

In 1997, several towns removed Bardot-inspired statues of Marianne after the actress voiced anti-immigrant sentiment. Also that year, she received death threats after calling for a ban on the sale of horse meat.

Environmental campaigner Paul Watson, who was beaten on a seal hunt protest in Canada alongside Bardot in 1977 and campaigned with her for five decades, acknowledged that “many disagreed with Brigitte’s politics or some of her views.”

“Her allegiance was not to the world of humans,” he said. “The animals of this world lost a wonderful friend today.”

Bardot once said that she identified with the animals that she was trying to save.

“I can understand hunted animals, because of the way I was treated,” Bardot said. “What happened to me was inhuman. I was constantly surrounded by the world press.”

Chevy Chase has revealed that he suffered near-fatal heart failure during the COVID-19 pandemic, an ordeal that left him in a medically induced coma for eight days and resulted in lasting memory issues.

The health emergency is detailed in the forthcoming CNN Films documentary I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not, which premieres next year.

While Chase’s hospitalization in 2021 was previously reported, the severity of his condition — including the coma and doctors warning his family to prepare for the worst — had not been publicly disclosed until now.

Chase’s daughter, Caley Chase, says in the documentary that her father “basically came back from the dead.” She recalls doctors warning the family, “We might not get him back. We don’t know how present he’ll be. Prepare yourselves for the worst.” According to Caley, when Chase regained consciousness, “all he could do was use his voice.”

Chase’s wife, Jayni Chase, describes the moment she realized something was seriously wrong. “Something was wrong, and he couldn’t explain to me what was wrong,” she says.

“So, we go to the ER. His heart stops.” She adds that doctors told her Chase had developed cardiomyopathy, explaining, “When the heart muscles get weaker, and they can’t pump as much blood out with each beat.”

A longtime friend of the comedian, Peter Aaron, says medical professionals ultimately placed Chase into a coma for approximately eight days, describing the decision as necessary but physically taxing.

Chase remained hospitalized for roughly five weeks before beginning his recovery.

Although the Caddyshack and National Lampoon star survived the episode, he says the medical trauma has left him with persistent memory gaps.

“According to the doctors, my memory would be shot from it,” Chase says in the documentary.

“That’s what’s happened here.” He adds that he now frequently relies on others to remind him of events or conversations he cannot recall.

The memory issues have also shaped how Chase responds to longstanding reports about his behavior on film and television sets.

In the documentary, he says he does not remember many of the incidents that contributed to his reputation as a difficult collaborator, attributing those gaps to the effects of his illness.

Elsewhere in the film, Chase addresses his feelings about being excluded from SNL50: The Anniversary Special earlier this year.

While he attended the event, the original Saturday Night Live cast member did not appear onstage during the broadcast. “It was kind of upsetting,” Chase says. “I expected that I would’ve been on the stage too with all the other actors.”

The president of the Kennedy Center on Friday (Dec. 26) fiercely criticized a musician’s sudden decision to cancel a Christmas Eve performance at the venue days after the White House announced that President Donald Trump’s name would be added to the facility.

“Your decision to withdraw at the last moment — explicitly in response to the Center’s recent renaming, which honors President Trump’s extraordinary efforts to save this national treasure — is classic intolerance and very costly to a non-profit Arts institution,” the venue’s president, Richard Grenell, wrote in a letter to musician Chuck Redd that was shared with The Associated Press.

In the letter, Grenell said he would seek $1 million in damages “for this political stunt.”

Redd did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A drummer and vibraphone player, Redd has presided over holiday “Jazz Jams” at the Kennedy Center since 2006, succeeding bassist William “Keter” Betts. In an email Wednesday to The Associated Press, Redd said he pulled out of the concert in the wake of the renaming.

“When I saw the name change on the Kennedy Center website and then hours later on the building, I chose to cancel our concert,” Redd said. He added Wednesday that the event has been a “very popular holiday tradition” and that he often featured at least one student musician.

“One of the many reasons that it was very sad to have had to cancel,” he told the AP.

President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, and Congress passed a law the following year naming the center as a living memorial to him.

Grenell is a Trump ally whom the president chose to head the Kennedy Center after he forced out the previous leadership. According to the White House, Trump’s handpicked board approved the renaming, which scholars have said violates the law. Kennedy niece Kerry Kennedy has vowed to remove Trump’s name from the building once he leaves office, and former House historian Ray Smock is among those who say any changes would have to be approved by Congress.

The law explicitly prohibits the board of trustees from making the center into a memorial to anyone else, and from putting another person’s name on the building’s exterior.

All products and services featured are independently chosen by editors. However, Billboard may receive a commission on orders placed through its retail links, and the retailer may receive certain auditable data for accounting purposes.

The 2025 Pop-Tarts Bowl is here and bringing with a hard-hitting match up between No. 12 BYU Cougars vs. No. 22 Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets. While missing their chance to make College Football Playoffs after losing in the Big 12 championship game earlier this month, the Cougars could still clinch their first 12-win season since 2001 with a victory this Saturday, Dec. 27. The Yellow Jackets, on the other hand, are fighting for their first 10-win season since 2011.

How to Watch the BYU vs. Georgia Tech Pop-Tarts Bowl, at a Glance:

Want to stream the Pop-Tarts Bowl online for free and without cable? Keep reading our guide below.

Where to Watch NCAA Football for Free

For cord-cutters, there are a few ways to watch the BYU vs. Georgia Tech Pop-Tarts Bowl, if you don’t have cable, especially if you want to watch for free. DirecTV has a five-day free trial, while other streaming services, such as Fubo, also offer free trials, so you can watch your favorite teams play for free.

A subscription to DirecTV — which comes with ABC, ACC Network, Big Ten Network, CBS, CBS Sports Network, The CW, ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, Fox, Fox Sports, NBC, SEC Network and truTV — gets you access to live TV, local and cable channels, starting at $49.99 for the first month $89.99 per month afterwards. The service even offers a five-day free trial to watch for free, if you sign up now.

You can watch local networks such as PBS, while you can also watch many cable networks, including Lifetime, FX, AMC, A&E, Bravo, BET, MTV, Paramount Network, Cartoon Network, VH1, Fuse, CNN, Food Network, CNBC and many others.

To watch the Pop-Tarts Bowl, Fubo starts at $54.99 for the first month of service $84.99 per month afterwards with nearly 235 channels — including local and cable — that are streamable on smart TVs, smartphones, tablets and on web browsers. And with a seven-day free trial, you can watch for free, if you act fast and sign up now.

The service even gets you live access to local broadcast networks including ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC, while it also has dozens of cable networks, such as ACC Network, Big Ten Network, CBS Sports Network, The CW, ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, Fox Sports, SEC Network and truTV and much more.

With prices starting at just $4.99 for a day pass, Sling TV includes ESPN, ESPN2 and ESPN 3 (for ABC simucast) with it Sling Orange and Sling Orange + Blue packages — which features dozens of channels that can be streamed on up to three devices at the same time. Sling Orange + Blue features FS1 and the NFL Network too.

For the most content options, Hulu + Live TV gives you access to the entire Hulu library in addition to more than 95 live TV channels — including ESPN and ABC for just $82.99 per month.

And, unlike the rest of the options, you can also expand your content library by bundling Hulu + Live TV with Disney+ and ESPN Unlimited. You’ll not only have all of the Hulu library to watch, but also exclusive and original programming available exclusively on ESPN Unlimited.