I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.
— Norma Desmond, Sunset Boulevard
An unsung tragic aspect of the total wreckage Hollywood has become is that every year we lose the greats who turned the screen industry into something magical, never to be replaced by the little people now destroying it. There are very few film legends left, and 2025 took away far too many of them. One of the most iconic died just last Sunday — Brigitte Bardot.
The same late 60s countercultural film wave that limited classic male Hollywood stars … made a leading man out of plain everyman Gene Hackman.
In a way, Bardot’s death was rather timely, even though she’d been off screen for over half a century. Because she still represents everything feminist-run Hollywoke fears and loathes — beauty, sexuality, femininity — which constitute true female empowerment. Not the laughable quasi-male caricature foisted on empty theaters by the hags and sissies in “creative” control. They wouldn’t know what to do with a Bardot today, other than deglamorize her and make her into an asexual girlboss or an asexual male-butt kicking action heroine, all five-feet-five, 125 pounds of her.
Aspiring director Roger Vadim knew what to do with BB, as the French came to affectionately call Bardot. At age 22, Vadim first noted the effect she had on men even as a 15-year-old Elle magazine cover girl. For three years, he was her Pygmalion, teaching her how to act and channel her sensuality for the camera. And like Pygmalion, he fell in love and lust with his creation. They married when she turned 18, then became each other’s career launching pad.
Luckily for BB, and us, Vadim wasn’t a predatory hack but a genuine film artist, who wanted to share his vision of Bardot with the world. First, he had to share it with a producer (Raoul Lévy), who also saw the girl’s potential, enough to finance a picture for her as Vadim’s writer-director debut, even without a screenplay. The movie Vadim wrote and directed to showcase Bardot changed the course of 20th Century cinema—And God Created Woman (1956).
The title alone — evoking the biblical (Genesis 2:22) reference to Eve – would send feminists into their (very) safe spaces. Not because of any implied sacrilege, which bothered conservatives at the time, but because it evokes the religious interpretation of women as natural temptresses rather than politically correct alt men. BB played a sexually liberated teen in a French village who has some idea of the male consternation her beauty and sensuality can cause. And Vadim had no qualms about showcasing both these qualities to a then scandalous degree of nudity and prurience.
Of course the film sparked outrage in mainstream society. And of course this only enticed audiences bored of artificial 1950s prudery. So And God Created Woman exploded financially. On a budget of $300,000, the film made $33 million, a staggering amount back then. Both Bardot and Vadim took off professionally, but their marriage ended soon after, after her affair with rising costar Jean-Louis Trintignant. It seemed Vadim had really captured Bardot’s essence.
BB remained a huge star for 17 years, and a sex symbol to this day. Rather than maintain the demands of the latter, and of countercultural 1970s moviedom, she gracefully retired in 1973. She dedicated herself to a new and lifelong passion — animal rights. “I gave my beauty and my youth to men,” she said. “I’m going to give my wisdom and experience to animals.” Besides her most famous charms, Bardot had another quality absent in Hollywoke — class.
Alas, Bardot wasn’t the only screen icon we lost this brutal year. There were several other legends. Among them:
Robert Redford — See my article, “When the Movie Legends Die.”
Diane Keaton — See my article, “When the Movie Legends Die“.
Rob Reiner — See my article, “Hollywood Horror: The Murder of Rob Reiner.”
Gene Hackman — The same late 60s countercultural film wave that limited classic male Hollywood stars (a half dozen went into television in the early 70s — James Stewart, Henry Fonda, Glenn Ford, Rock Hudson, Tony Curtis, James Garner) made a leading man out of plain everyman Gene Hackman in The French Connection. And he validated it for more than 30 years.
David Lynch — What lesser auteurs of macabre cinema (Guillermo del Toro, Jordan Peele, Ari Ester) wish to be, David Lynch really was, a master of the craft. Lynch had one major advantage over the others — heart. You’re not scared for his protagonists, you feel for them, from the hideous The Elephant Man to the gorgeous Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive.
Richard Chamberlain — Chamberlain was a TV heartthrob to every woman now over 70 for Dr. Kildare (1961-1966) and every woman over 60 for The Thorn Birds (1983). He impressed both sexes as the dashing British hero stuck in feudal Japan in Shogun (1980). All three were cultural phenomena. Though never a movie star, he delivered charismatic performances in prestigious features Petulia (1968), The Three Musketeers (1973), and The Last Wave (1977).
Val Kilmer — Kilmer was a movie star for a little while (The Doors, Batman Forever), but he made more of a mark in memorable supporting roles: Iceman in Top Gun, DeNiro’s gunman in Heat, and most unforgettably as Doc Holiday in the great late Western Tombstone (1993).
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