How Brigitte Bardot got under our skin Bardot was born in 1934, the daughter of Louis Bardot, a wealthy industrialist, and his wife Anne-Marie. Brigitte and her younger sister, Marie-Jeanne had a conventional upper-middle-class upbringing in the affluent Paris suburb of Passy. Brigitte studied ballet at the Paris Conservatoire and her mother encouraged her to pursue a modelling career. In 1949, aged 15, she appeared on the cover of Elle magazine. The film director Marc Allégret spotted her and dispatched his assistant, the journalist and photographer Roger Vadim, to invite her to audition for a role. She didn't get the part, but Vadim noticed a quality far more potent than mere acting ability, and set about developing it. Bardot remarked that the secret of her success was lucky timing, and the beginning of her career caught the swell of two waves of social change - the rise of mass media in France, and the emergence of a feminist critique of the conventional roles of women. Brigitte Bardot In 1949, the year of Bardot's first cover shoot, Simone de Beauvoir (who would later anatomise the Bardot phenomenon in her 1960 essay, Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome) published The Second Sex, and the weekly photojournal Paris Match was launched. Vadim saw to it that Brigitte, still an obscure starlet, appeared twice on the magazine's cover, in 1951 and 1952, when she was billed as "the new Leslie Caron." At the end of 1952 the magazine devoted two pages to her wedding to Vadim, under the headline "Brigitte Found Her Husband At Paris Match." Already she was becoming famous for being famous, her image adroitly positioned by Vadim, who took her to Cannes and contrived "spontaneous" photo-ops in which Bardot, barefoot with messy hair as though she'd just fallen out of bed, or dressed for the beach in a bikini, made a startling contrast to established stars. By the time Vadim directed her in And God Created Woman (1956), the film that turned her into a global sensation, Bardot was already the focus of an explosive mixture of fascination and loathing. Her acting skills had the critics straining for hostile superlatives: "Even when she says "hello" she manages to sound false," moaned the satirical weekly, Le Canard Enchaîné, while Claude Mauriac (son of the ultra-Catholic novelist, François) attacked Vadim for "complacently exposing the body of his wife," and Bardot for her "rampant narcissism." Not everyone minded so much about the exposing of the body: "Thank God there is Brigitte Bardot, the profile of a Renoir model, the walk of a dancer, an admirable mane," wrote Jacques Doniol-Valcroze in France Observateur, concluding: "You cannot imagine a more charming and gracious young animal." The essence of Bardot, however - and the secret, perhaps, of her allure - was that her sex-kitten grace was combined with a bourgeois sense of confidence and entitlement. Unlike those other heroines of French culture, Edith Piaf and Coco Chanel (who, oddly for the designer who pioneered uncorseted fashion, loathed Bardot's "make-shift" style), Bardot hadn't clawed her way up from the streets. Her provocatively "masculine" attitude towards her own sexuality, and her high-handed approach to her career, was at once subversive, and rooted in the sense of security that comes from a privileged background. It was a combination that simultaneously attracted and repelled. Intellectuals such as de Beauvoir and the novelists Marguerite Duras and Françoise Sagan, were fascinated by Bardot's transgressive candour, while mass audiences couldn't help being riveted by her extraordinary child-woman sexiness. When she became the first celebrity model for Marianne, the emblem of the French republic, a provincial mayor refused to marry people beneath her bare-breasted image on the grounds that he couldn't advocate fidelity under Brigitte Bardot's gaze. The highlights of Bardot's film career are modest by comparison with her celebrity, but Prof Vincendeau argues that her best work - including Marc Allégret's early comedy, En Effeuillant la Marguerite (1956), and her films with new-wave directors such as Louis Malle (Vie Privée, 1962) and Jean-Luc Godard (Le Mépris, 1963), are eloquent commentaries on celebrity. The only sadness for British film fans is that Bardot's magnificent contribution to British filmography, her first English-speaking film, Doctor at Sea (1955) in which she co-starred with Dirk Bogarde as Dr Sparrow, is unaccountably missing from Ciné Lumière's season. And Bardot Became BB" is at Ciné Lumière until March 21 (020 7871 3515) Brigitte Bardot" by Ginette Vincendeau is published by Palgrave Macmillan, £12.99