Paul Thomas: Downfall of a sex symbol

It was a sight to make male baby boomers' blood run cold. A batty old woman glares out of a news photo. Her hair is lank and greying; her mouth sags as if she has suffered a stroke. Her world view is intolerant and xenophobic, her state of mind unutterably bleak. She much prefers animals to people.

She is Brigitte Bardot at 71.

After Marilyn Monroe took herself out of the picture, Bardot was the world's most potent sex symbol and thus prime fantasy fodder for males who underwent adolescence between 1955 and 1975. She was a Dream Girl with Gallic insouciance, whose flouting of convention made her a figurehead of the cultural revolution.

Like all enduring sex symbols, her appeal transcended her physical appearance - one critic described her as every man's idea of the girl he would like to meet in Paris - and the sway her image held over the male imagination wasn't dependent on talent or achievement.

In fact, her film career was, for the most part, eminently forgettable. Discovered at 15 by the director Roger Vadim, Bardot's early career mainly consisted of coy titillation designed to cash in on the fact that Hollywood was still locked in the puritanical choke-hold of the Hays Office, the legacy of a political hack from the bible belt named Will Hays who in 1922 effectively became chief censor and moral guardian with a brief to make movies safe for American children.

When anglicised with a nod and a wink and a snigger, the titles of her films spoke for themselves: The Girl in the Bikini, Nero's Mistress, Her Bridal Night, Naughty Girl,
Mamselle Striptease.

As well as being the high point of both their careers, Vadim's And God Created Women (1956) propelled Bardot to the forefront of pop culture where she remained for 20 years. There is a certain irony in the fact that a film which played a small but undeniable role in undermining organised religion's censorious influence on popular entertainment should have a title that the most ardent born-again morals crusader would wholeheartedly endorse.

Bardot's subsequent career was mostly dross. It didn't matter: she was BB. She was an icon so it didn't matter how bad her movies were. You didn't watch the movie; you watched her.

After divorcing Vadim, she worked her way through a succession of leading men and scalp-hunting playboys and was the catalyst for St Tropez's transformation from sleepy Mediterranean fishing village to hang-out for the beautiful people.

One of her final movies was that genuine cinematic oddity Shalako, a British-made Western in which she starred opposite Sean Connery. Bardot reportedly assumed Connery would bear some resemblance to his James Bond persona, a sort of male version of Hugh Grant, and was taken aback to discover that in the flesh he was a bald, working-class Scotsman.

In 1973, at the ripe old age of 39, BB announced she was retiring from show business to campaign for animal welfare. She embarked on a curious journey becoming a recluse, albeit with a menagerie, whose rare public pronouncements were tinged with world-weariness bordering on misanthropy - she described her only child as a tumour. They are, needless to say, estranged.

She became a supporter of Jean Marie Le Pen's far right National Front Party and took one of its leading lights as her fourth husband - although these days, it seems, he lags well behind her dogs in her affections. She released a book in which she raged against immigrants, homosexuals and Muslims and called for the return of the guillotine.

In some respects Bardot is the flip side of the coin to Jane Fonda, a woman with whom she has much in common, notably Vadim, who directed and married them both.

Fonda made her political marriage (to Tom Hayden, a student radical turned state politician) earlier rather than later but after years of trying to live down her Hanoi Jane image, she is upsetting people all over again, this time by speaking out against America's involvement in Iraq.

Although an accomplished actor, Fonda had her sex symbol moment courtesy, of course, of Vadim. Barbarella, his 1967 adaptation of an adult comic strip, pretty much boiled down to the leading lady slipping in and out of her skimpy fetish-wear to engage in sex of anything but the meat-and-potatoes variety. One of her trysts is with a character played by Anita Pallenberg, lover of no fewer than three Rolling Stones.

Vadim, who died in 2000, could perhaps be regarded as the thinking man's Hugh Hefner. His body of work is unlikely to gain him a place in the directors' pantheon, but he must be acknowledged as one of the great womanisers of his era.

He was married five times - to four actresses (the others were Annette Stroyberg and Marie-Christine Barrault) and an heiress, which many men might regard as the recipe for a perfect life. He also fathered a child by Catherine Deneuve.

Not one for false modesty, he called his autobiography From One Star to the Next.