As she approaches her 80th year, Brigitte Bardot has become a great-grandmother for the first time
Brigitte Bardot has been many things both on-screen and off, in a life that has given rise to many column-inches in newspapers and magazines over the decades.
Her very tortured family sagas have been the cause of much of the scandal and gossip that have surrounded Bardot since she was a teenager. She readily admits to have been always lacking in maternal instinct and gave birth to just one child – Nicolas – on the 11th of January 1960, during her marriage to the actor Jacques Charrier. Even in her autobiography “Initiales BB”, she says that “Of the two of us (Jacques and her), it was he that had the maternal instinct.”
After their divorce in 1962, therefore, it was Charrier who took the toddler Nicolas into his care. Years rolled on and Bardot has had precious little to do with her son or his offspring, but according to yet another new biography on the screen icon (this time by Yves Bigot), the happy event of her becoming a great-grandmother has brought an unprecedented rapprochement to the family.
According to Bigot, Nicolas “informed his mother that she had become a great-grandmother and sent her photos of the new arrival. Nicolas wasn’t an easy child, but he has changed and they now have very good relations.”
Bardot hadn’t seen her son for over a decade. In an interview given in 2009 to Paris Match, the former screen goddess says: “No, I’m not a good grandmother. They (her granddaughters) live in Norway with their father (Nicolas), they don’t speak French and we don’t have the opportunity to see one another. Why dress it up any other way? You know, I’ve always said what I think and thought what I said. I never believed in blood ties.”
On the 27th of September 1984, during the marriage of her son Nicolas Charrier to Norwegian top model Anne-Line Bjerkan, Brigitte Bardot was not invited. As for her two granddaughters – Anna-Camilla and Thea-Jospehine – she has only seen them once – on the 16th of August 1992, when she married her current husband Bernard d’Ormale.
Her devotion to animal rights over the last 41 years might give grounds to emotional displacement theories of many psychiatrists who would see her obsession with animals as compensating for her lack of familial love, but it looks like this latest news has brought the tempestuous former actress full circle.