In the 1950s and 1960s, the film star Brigitte Bardot, known as ‘BB’ (her initials, pronounced in French, also mean ‘baby’), was the most famous French woman on the planet and the first French mass-media celebrity in post-war France. The cult and adulation but also the hysteria and hostility she generated were unprecedented, to the extent that new words such as Bardotmania, Bardophilia, Bardology, and Bardography were invented, anticipating Beatlemania by a decade. Today, the popularity of her films has faded, and many of them are forgotten, including in France, with a few exceptions such as Roger Vadim's Et Dieu… créa la femme/And God Created Woman, the film that launched her global fame in 1956 and Jean-Luc Godard's Le Mépris/Contempt (1963), a reflection on her stardom and on cinema in general. Her iconic status, however, has endured.

Bardot offers a fascinating case study for thinking about the icon as a ‘cultural model’. Her example is instructive in terms of how a modern icon is constructed and developed, how it evolves and how it survives, the impact it had on French culture in a particular era, and more generally on global representations of femininity. As a film star, Bardot belongs to the past (she stopped making films in 1973), but as an icon she is timeless. Bardot fits the category defined by film scholar Christine Geraghty as the ‘star-as-celebrity’, meaning a star whose private life is more important than her professional performance.