B.B.’s ’A’s and ’B’s: From Sex-Symbol to Animal Rights Activist, Decoding Brigitte Bardot’s Handwriting

The troubled journey of a paradoxical icon

Brigitte Bardot, on the cover of Screenland’s March 1959 issue

The death of an icon

Brigitte Bardot, the French actress, singer, and animal rights activist, often referred to by her initials B.B., died on the 28th of December 2025. With 47 films and more than 60 songs to her credit, she gained worldwide fame, becoming a symbol of the sexual revolution in the 1960s and a pop culture icon. As an embodiment of this era, she was also chosen as the official representative of Marianne, the national personification of the French Republic, her bust being displayed in town halls as a symbol of liberty from 1969 to 1972.

B.B. is a true French icon, though a controversial one, because of her lifestyle and opinions. Without desiring any of this, she became a symbol of post-war youth’s need for change and freedom, as well as women’s aspiration for emancipation.

At 38, overwhelmed by her celebrity, she gave up her acting career to devote herself to animal welfare. To establish her foundation (Fondation Brigitte Bardot) to protect wild and domestic animals in France and internationally, she sold her jewels and other valuable possessions. She continued this fight until her death at 91, using her fame to advance the cause she considered her life’s mission.

B.B. Unveiled: The Meaning Behind Her ‘a’s and ‘b’s

Let’s look at her handwriting and try to understand her complex, sometimes paradoxical personality.

Her large, over-structured, stylized handwriting, with its inflated predominant middle zone, makes quite an impression. The notes she writes are often adorned with drawings of flowers or hearts, reinforcing the desire to please and seduce, already present in the loops and spirals in the middle zone and in the dimension that shouts for attention.

B.B.’s handwriting appears to be a blend of contrasting elements, indicating a complex personality.

Her large handwriting with its inflated ovals and predominant middle zone, its compacity with no or very small margins, combined with the spiral-shaped letters and middle zone loops, signals important needs and emotional demands in a self-centered person who has retained an adolescent personality and finds it difficult to put things into perspective in order to see the bigger picture.

Her demands are so high and unrealistic that she can only feel dissatisfied as the irregular dimension, the alternating rounded, inflated letters with disconnected sticks, and the double-closed ovals suggest. Dissatisfaction and a feeling of deprivation seem to be a permanent counterpart to the ever-present hunger for emotional nurturing. A strong need for recognition combined with low self-esteem causes her to go through emotional ups and downs, high expectations followed by disappointment and despair.

But she is also strong-willed and determined with her controlled, over-structured, stylized, vertical handwriting, tension 4a, arcades, reversed letters, and double-closed ovals. She wants to control her life, be in charge. In her claim to independence, she wants to stand out, assert her uniqueness, and strives to embody a personal ideal, hoping it will ward off pain and frustration. This is her way of protecting herself: closing up and building a defensive shield around herself to present the world with a strong, vibrant persona, while inside she feels like an abandoned little girl. Dependency and immaturity also appear in touching letters (adossata), regressive forms, spiral-shaped and inflated letters added to the large, dominant, and irregular middle zone.

B.B.’s handwriting reveals a combination of ingenuity and naivety, a desire for independence and extreme dependence, emotional greed and loneliness, strong self-awareness and lack of self-confidence, and a need for attention combined with a desire to withdraw into oneself. Beyond the star persona hides a frightened little girl.

As she writes in her book “Tears of Battle”: “My life is like this: all or nothing, extreme glory and extreme despair, extreme love for me and sometimes extreme aversion.”**

She also explains that, as a child, she often felt abandoned, lonely, and desperate, and sometimes even wanted to die.

“I don’t like being dependent on others, yet I am dependent on love and attention. In that sense, I am not at all an emancipated woman. When someone left me, it felt like they were abandoning a dog. I was lost in my thirst for the absolute. Only animals could fill this immense void because no animal has ever abandoned me except to die.“

From fame to feeling like prey

Brigitte Bardot had been exposed to the public eye from an early age. From 13 onward, she began appearing in magazines thanks to her upper-class family connections. She was on “Elle”’s cover for the first time at 15, posing as the modern young girl. Her family, fearing that she would become a cover girl, allowed her to continue on condition that she would not be paid and that her name would not appear, hence the initials B.B.

From birth to age 16, she was also filmed by her parents, who loved cinema and owned a camera, which was rare at the time. Her mother wanted to become an actress. Brigitte fulfilled her mother’s dream but never really enjoyed acting, as it wasn’t her true calling.

Brigitte’s childhood was no bed of roses. She felt ugly and suffered from being compared to her younger sister, who was her parents’ favorite and excelled in school, while Brigitte struggled to keep up. About her childhood, she said: “I was raised by conservative parents from an austere bourgeois background, who gave me a fairly strict upbringing. I knew the whip… I went to a Catholic school and was supervised by a governess. I never went out on the street alone. I was closely monitored until I was fifteen.” That is when she met Roger Vadim, the future screenwriter and film director, who was 6 years older than she was.

They fell in love, and Brigitte abandoned dancing, which she was passionate about and very good at. She could have become a ballet dancer, but chose cinema as opportunities crossed her path, and she needed to become financially independent to escape her family and live with Vadim.

Her parents did everything they could to prevent this romance. They tried to separate them by sending her to a boarding school in England. This triggered her first suicide attempt, which convinced her parents to let her marry him, on the condition that she wait until she turned 18.

Later, B.B. wrote:

“At a very young age, I decided that life wasn’t worth living if it meant suffering. So I saw suicide as a way out.”

She would later attempt suicide several times and always carried tubes of sleeping pills with her so she could end it all at any moment.

Brigitte Bardot in the film A Very Private Affair, 1962.

In 1956, “And God Created Woman,” directed by Vadim, marked the beginning of her stardom and the end of their marriage, as she fell in love with her co-star, Jean-Louis Trintignant. From then on, she was constantly hounded by reporters and felt she no longer belonged to herself. To escape this constant prying, she bought a fisherman’s house in Saint Tropez, on the French Riviera, La Madrague, a place that would become her refuge, her haven of peace. Vadim said about the movie: “The film was our artistic child. It was a wonderful way to break up!”

B.B. specified about her need to escape the public’s scrutiny: “I create my own world within the world of others and try not to stray too far from it. […] One of the goals of my existence is to preserve a world of my own, as beautiful and honest as possible.”

Throughout her life, she had numerous affairs that received widespread media coverage. In 1959, she married Jacques Charrier, a French actor, with whom she had her only son, Nicolas, born on January 11, 1960.

She did not want to become a mother, did not really want to marry him either, and had considered having an abortion when she found out she was pregnant. She had already had two abortions before, but now she was so famous that no doctor was willing to take the risk of performing an abortion on her, as it was still illegal.

During her pregnancy, she had to stay locked up in her apartment because journalists were besieging her building, and she had to give birth at home. Her pregnancy was a traumatic experience during which she tried to commit suicide to prevent her husband, who had been drafted, from going to war in Algeria. She wrote in her memoirs: “My pregnancy was nine months of hell. It was like a tumor feeding off me, growing inside my swollen body, waiting for the blessed moment when it would finally be removed.” And: “I would have preferred to give birth to a little dog.”

She divorced Charrier in 1963, and he raised their son, who grew mostly apart from his mother. As she explained, she couldn’t be a mother as she herself needed to be cared for like a child.

The turning point

All her life, Brigitte has always shown a deep love for animals; she kept various species on her country property and carried out rescue operations whenever she had the chance. In 1962, she appeared on T.V. to denounce the barbaric practices in slaughterhouses, her first public statement in support of animals.

But in 1973, at the age of 38, she took a radical decision, ending her film career to devote herself to animal welfare.

In 1986, she established the Brigitte Bardot Foundation in Saint-Tropez, her organization dedicated to animal protection. To have it recognized as a public benefit organization, she auctioned off items from her former glory days, including jewelry, personal effects, and dresses.

She then declared:

“I gave my youth and my beauty to men. Now let me give my wisdom and my experience and the best of myself to animals.”

And that is what she did for the rest of her life. In 1992, she met and married her fourth and last husband, Bernard d’Ormale, who helped her reconcile with her son, then married to a Norwegian and living in Norway.

Serving the cause with an ever-growing fighting spirit

Brigitte Bardot always spoke her mind bluntly, putting animal rights above all else, which led her to being accused of racism and being taken to court multiple times. She answered these accusations:

“What I deeply condemn is that, supposedly in the name of a religion, a faith, or a ritual, we end up causing animals to suffer… This is the basis for all the accusations of racism leveled against me simply because I criticize a religion.”

While her handwriting has remained relatively stable over the years, it has become simpler and more rigid as she has become more determined and focused, committed only to the cause with which she identifies.

Her “t” bars, for example, are representative of this transformation: held aloft like banners, they are the unwavering standard-bearers of a cause she regards as a vital struggle — one that cannot be questioned and that she will defend no matter what.

It seems that over the years, she has become increasingly determined, reacting more vehemently and clinging even more firmly to her convictions. The lack of nuance and perspective in her judgments colors every statement she makes. And she doesn’t care about hurting some sensibilities or being sued.

This radicalization reflects her despair at seeing animal suffering, a trait that has been present throughout her life, but which became more and more predominant through the years as she seems to have identified herself with suffering animals, for example, when she was pursued by reporters and had to lock herself up, becoming terrified prey because of her fame.

Over the years, her handwriting has also become simpler. She got rid of some spirals and loops. Her inflated ovals are still there, but a bit smaller and less invasive; the handwriting is less connected and has lost some of its fluidity. This points to being more thoughtful, less spontaneous, more careful, maybe, even though she is still passionate and intense. But she is no longer trying to seduce or manipulate. She relies less on subterfuge to hide her despair. She still wants to convince, but she seems less insecure, more rooted in her beliefs, and less impulsive.

Saving animals meant saving herself and gave her the courage to continue a life that could never fully meet her expectations. In her autobiography, she wrote:

“I often realize that if I hadn’t taken care of animals, I would have killed myself, just like Marilyn and Romy did.”

And she ended one of her books with this sentence: “My soul is animal”.

But what a paradox, that this woman, considered an icon of the women’s liberation movement, was so insecure and so dependent! She has always made it clear that she couldn’t care less about feminism and just wanted to be herself and do what she pleased. In her own words:

“I simply was the person I wanted to be: natural, genuine, and honest.”

Maybe what she truly embodies is an era marked by individualism, consumerism, and self-centeredness — traits that her fame, achieved too early, has taken to the extreme. Yet, she finally found her life’s purpose, turning her despair into an obsession with animal welfare, thus providing some relief to the suffering beings with whom she identified. A tormented journey that led her from being promoted as an iconic sex symbol to becoming the Mother Teresa of animals.

Sources:

Brigitte Bardot, “Initiales B.B. — mémoires”

Brigitte Bardot, “Larmes de combat”