Shortly after she announced her retirement from acting in 1973, Brigette Bardot sat down with French journalist Claude Sarraute who asked Bardot if she was afraid of aging. Without hesitation, Bardot said no.
“That’s not a fear at all because we can’t do anything about it. It’s completely natural, it happens to everyone,” Bardot went on to explain. “We’re very young, we grow up, we age, and we die. But I’m not going to be anxious about it because then it’d feel horrible.”
Bardot, who turns 90 today, can be considered one of the most transformative beauty icons in pop culture. Starting her career in 1953, Bardot has more than 50 films credited under her name before her retirement at 40 years old. She is most known for her role in And God Created Woman, which made her an international sex symbol and early pioneer of the quintessential French fringe and layered bouffant. But it’s her refusal to succumb to the societal pressure to maintain a youthful appearance at all costs as she ages that has set her apart from her peers.
“She has never avoided the cruel gaze of the mirror. She withstands aging with aplomb,” said serial biographer Marie-Dominique Lelièvre in a 2014 interview with The Guardian. “Brigitte Bardot has bowed out of the limelight, has refused plastic surgery, and hasn’t tried to maintain her looks,” Dennis Nothdurft, curator of the Fashion and Textile Museum in London, told The Guardian in a 2009 interview. “That’s quite refreshing because it’s realistic. It is aging on her own terms.”
While many celebrities claim to have never gone under the knife (some even refuse to admit to laser facials), Bardot embodies what it actually means to age naturally. Recent photos show her silver mane untouched by hair dye and her skin sans the filler, Botox, or other cosmetic enhancements. “I don’t feel old or used up,” she said in a 2013 interview with Vanity Fair, “and I don’t have time to waste thinking about aging, because I live only for my cause.”
She still lives in St.-Tropez, continuing her work as an animal rights advocate and running the Brigitte Bardot Foundation. Though she has become quite a controversial figure (she has been fined multiple times for racist remarks and has harshly critiqued the #MeToo movement), her stance on aging has never wavered since that 1973 interview with Sarraute.
“It’s beautiful, a lady with white hair who’s wise and tells beautiful stories. I think it’s wonderful,” she went on to say to Sarraute. “There aren’t many left, but I think it’s great. And women should embrace aging because, at the end of the day, it’s much more beautiful to have a grandmother with white hair who looks like an elderly lady than to have a grandmother who’s bleached, dyed, and made up [and] who looks much older but also really unhappy.”