"It is not important how people remember me in the future. The most important thing is what happens today. When I am dead and gone I do not care what people think of me."

Bardot, who turns 72 this year, may or may not have been sincere in pitching such posthumous modesty to an Australian magazine a couple of years ago.

Hers has been a journey from sex icon -- an object of panting lust from a whole continent of heterosexual males -- to an animal rights champion and occasional sociopolitical provocateur who has attracted as many foes as she has friends and admirers.

During the second half of her life, she has not only courted controversy with her support for animals rights -- not the least this week when she returned to Canada to again batter the government for allowing its annual cull of harp seals -- but also veered close to political pariahdom.

Two years ago, French courts ruled she incited racial hatred with a book that lamented the "Muslim over-running" of France and aired other explosive views, including some about homosexuals.

The world first began to hear about blond Bardot, daughter of a Paris industrialist, Charles Bardot, in the mid-1950s when she began a modelling and acting career that saw her eventually make no fewer than 48 films, most of them fluffy enterprises that became vehicles for the camera to adore her curvaceous physical gifts.

Her heyday as sex symbol came in the swinging 1960s, when she helped establish St. Tropez as the chosen resort of European sunworshippers and hedonists.

She became the favourite front cover of international magazines, modelling not only the latest bikini fashions, but, on occasions, the breast-bearing mono-kini as well. The south of France was about flesh and fun and Bardot epitomized the times.

Her career was peaking at roughly the same time. Propelled to the top rung of European starlets with her 1956 film And God Created Women, made by her then-husband Roger Vadim, Bardot went on to ride the new wave cinema movement in France.

After a period of reclusion in the south of France, she starred in a series of glossy 1960s crowd-pleasers while continuing to model and dabble in pop music, most notably with the saucy boy of French pop music, Serge Gainsbourg.

She made a brief Hollywood foray with Jimmy Stewart in Dear Brigitte, and co-starred with Jeanne Moreau and George Hamilton in the 1969 Western epic, Viva Maria!, directed by France's Louis Malle.

Bardot was, in those days, Europe's answer to Marilyn Monroe. Both were the fantasies of a whole generation of heterosexual males. Both became portraits painted by Andy Warhol. And both had private lives that were appropriately tumultuous.

After divorcing Vadim, Bardot went on to three other marriages, not to mention all the reports of torrid affairs, whether false or true, with the likes of Gainsbourg and another singer, Sacha Distel.

Her subsequent husbands were German millionaire playboy Gunther Sachs (1966-69) and a French right-wing politician, Bernard D'Ormale, with whom she remains after their marriage in 1992.

The kitten of St. Tropez may have become an aging cat -- one, by the way, that has publicly eschewed the lure of plastic surgery to protect her looks from the ravages of age -- but still we associate her with those burnished beach photographs in the now antique pages of Paris Match.

We may forget that Bardot turned her back on cinema and everything else that created her bosom-heaving persona more than thirty years ago. Her last film was in 1974.

"I've made 48 films of which only five were good. The rest are not worth anything. I will not make another," she told one interviewer at the time.

With Act Two, Bardot has successfully parlayed her celebrity to become Europe's most indefatigable -- and controversial -- saviour of the animal kingdom.

While the U.S.-based PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, is an organization that repeatedly recruits film stars and models as ambassadors to the cause, Bardot has been a one-woman band, relentlessly campaigning for the end of mistreatment of animals around the globe.

And it has hardly been a flash-in-the-pan crusade. In 1986, the actress put up most of her worldly goods -- from jewellery to her fancy spread in St. Tropez -- for auction.

With the three million French francs the sale raised, she moved her headquarters to Paris and called her organization the Brigitte Bardot Foundation for the Welfare and Protection of Animals.

With these new resources she set about launching legal challenges to strong-arm governments and other institutions to acknowledge the rights of animals.

She took on the meat industry in France, demanding less cruel means of slaughter and pressuring her countrymen, with only limited success, to jettison their taste for horse meat.

She has lobbied Vladimir Putin to end dogfighting in Russia, campaigned for the end of bear-dancing in Bulgaria and fought to preserve families of wolves in Hungary.

"I have spent my entire life trying to make people respect all animal life," Bardot said in a recent interview. "The respect of their lives is as ours, essential to the ecological system as well.

"It has been my experience that almost everyone does not care about this issue, and I cannot be everywhere. The human race makes me feel so upset. It is money that rules this world and leads to the worst possible atrocities."

Her sometimes incendiary political views can arguably be traced back to the 1992 marriage with D'Ormale. It brought her into the orbit of the political right and painted her as a supporter, in particular, of National Front leader and voice of the anti-immigration movement in France, Jean-Marie Le Pen.

The association apparently encouraged Bardot to lay bare some private thoughts on the policies of French governments that surely were better left unsaid. The trouble she has generated for herself over recent years has also proved an unfortunate distraction from her animal rights campaigning.

It first surfaced in 1998, when a court found her guilty of inciting racial hatred after making public comments about civilian massacres in Algeria.

Such reprimands apparently had little effect on the former sex bomb. In 2003, she published a book entitled A Scream In The Silence, that brought more accusations of both anti-Muslim and antigay bigotry.

She denounced interracial marriage, called homosexuals "fairground freaks" and assaulted the government for being overgenerous to the unemployed and to immigrants.

Fining her $6,000 this time, a court said that in her book, Bardot "presents Muslims as barbaric and cruel invaders, responsible for terrorist acts and eager to dominate the French to the extent of wanting to exterminate them."

While not present for the verdict, she had tearfully defended herself to the court a few weeks before. "I was born in 1934, at that time interracial marriage wasn't approved. There are many new languages in the new Europe. Mediocrity is taking over from beauty and splendour. There are many people who are filthy, badly dressed and badly shaven."

She later made an attempt at social rehabilitation at least among the gay and lesbian community of France with a letter to a French gay magazine that may or may not have been well advised. "Apart from my husband -- who maybe will cross over one day as well -- I am entirely surrounded by homos," she wrote. "For years, they have been my support, my friends, my adopted children, my confidants."

In Canada this week, however, Bardot has returned to her true calling for the past three decades. Indeed, by deciding to tackle the new Conservative government of Stephen Harper over the seal cull that is about to get under way in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, she has completed a full circle of campaigning for animal rights.

The last time she travelled here was in 1977 and the cause, as now, was the protection of the harp seals. She was famously photographed embracing a seal pup, a blatant attempt to win over public sentiment against the eastern Canadian hunting industry.

"I am not crazy," a tearful Bardot reassured a packed press conference in Ottawa earlier this week. "I am pleading with you. This will likely be my last visit to Canada before I die. I want to see this barbaric massacre stopped before I die."

Her appeal followed a similar visit to Canada last month, similarly in the name of the harp seal, by Paul McCartney and his wife, Heather Mills McCartney.

She asked for a meeting with Harper, who flatly turned her down. That was after she delivered to him an impassioned letter, wrapped in a photograph of a bloody seal after its killing.

In it she implied he had a closed mind to the arguments of animal campaigners, asserting, with a striking lack of courtesy normally due a head of government, "only idiots refuse to change their minds."

She is receiving backing from animal rights campaigners in Canada and around the world -- a demonstration in her support was planned for yesterday, for instance, outside the Canadian consulate in Dublin -- but if she was hoping to melt hearts in the Canadian government she appears to have failed.

Officials insist that the seals, which compete with fishermen for cod in Atlantic waters, have risen in number to at least five million, roughly three times higher than in the 1970s.

"It's the most legislated and regulated hunt in the world, and still these animal rights groups continue to use the beautiful seal to raise millions of dollars," insisted Edward Picco, Education Minister for the Nunavut aboriginal tribes that mostly hunt the animals. "The only cruelty here is the cruelty being inflicted on aboriginal Canadians."

This time, Bardot will surely return to France disappointed. And, as she says, this was probably her last visit to Canada and her last stand for the harp seals.

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