PARIS — France said goodbye to one of its biggest movie stars, Brigitte Bardot, on Wednesday with a funeral in Saint-Tropez, the French Riviera resort where the icon lived for more than half a century after retiring from movie stardom at the height of her fame.
The ceremonies included a private service followed by a public homage.
The animal rights activist and far-right supporter died Dec. 28 at age 91 at her home in southern France.
She died from cancer after undergoing two operations, her husband, Bernard d’Ormale, said in an interview with Paris Match magazine released Tuesday evening. “She was conscious and concerned about the fate of animals until the very end,” he said.
Residents and admirers applauded the funeral convoy as the coffin of Bardot, once one of the world's most photographed women and a defining screen siren of the 1960s, was being carried through the town's narrow streets.
A service started to the sound of Maria Callas’ “Ave Maria” at the Notre-Dame-de-l’Assomption Catholic Church in the presence of Bardot’s husband, son and grandchildren, as well as guests invited by the family and the Brigitte Bardot Foundation for the protection of animals.
“Sadness is overwhelming, and pain too,” Max Guazzini, a friend and secretary general of the Foundation, said in a speech.
“We’re going to dream about her as if we were sleeping. In our dream, Brigitte arrives in a great, white immensity and suddenly … thousands of seals arrive,” he said. “All the animals she saved and she loved form a procession behind her … Thousands of animals say: Brigitte, we will miss you, we love you so much, thank you.”
Hundreds of people gathered in the small town to follow the farewell on large screens set up at the port and on two plazas.
Bardot is to be buried “in the strictest privacy” at a cemetery overlooking the Mediterranean Sea.
She had long called Saint-Tropez her refuge from the celebrity that once made her a household name.
A public homage took place Wednesday afternoon at a nearby site for admirers of the woman whose image once symbolized France's postwar liberation and sensuality.
“Brigitte Bardot will forever be associated with Saint-Tropez, of which she was the most dazzling ambassador,” the town hall said last week. “Through her presence, personality and aura, she marked the history of our town.”
Bardot settled decades ago in her seaside villa, La Madrague, and retired from filmmaking in 1973 at age 39, during an international career that spanned more than two dozen films.
She later emerged as an animal rights activist, founding and sustaining a foundation devoted to the protection of animals.
While she withdrew from the film industry, she remained a highly visible and often controversial public figure through decades of militant animal rights activism and links with far-right politics.
She will be buried in the so-called marine cemetery, where her parents are also interred.
The cemetery, overlooking the Mediterranean sea, is also the final resting place of several cultural figures, including filmmaker Roger Vadim, Bardot’s first husband, who directed her breakout film “And God Created Woman,” a role that made her a worldwide star.
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