French actor Jacques Charrier, whose marriage with cinema icon Brigitte Bardot put him in the celebrity spotlight, has died aged 88, his family told AFP Thursday.
Charrier had already enjoyed early film success when he met Bardot on the set of “Babette Goes To War” (“Babette s’en va-t’en guerre”) in which they co-starred.
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The couple got married in June 1959, two years after Bardot divorced film director Roger Vadim. They had a son, Nicolas-Jacques, Bardot’s only child, born in January 1960.
She later wrote that the pregnancy, that Charrier had urgently wished for, had been a trying experience for her.
“It felt like I had been feeding a tumor that I was carrying in my bloated flesh,” she wrote in her memoir “Initiales BB” published in 1996.
“All I could do was wait for the blessed moment when I would be delivered, finally.”
Charrier and their son sued Bardot and her publisher, claiming that the unborn child’s privacy had been violated, winning 250,000 francs (36,000 euros) in damages.
A few months later he published his own book “My Answer to Brigitte Bardot” (“Ma Reponse a Brigitte Bardot”) in which he painted an unflattering picture of his former partner.
Charrier worked with several of France’s leading directors, including Claude Chabrol, Agnes Varda and Jean-Luc Godard, also producing several films.
He quit the film industry in the 1980s to turn to painting, his first love. His works are film regularly shown in France and abroad.
Bardot, 90, symbolised the 1960s sexual revolution in French cinema and beyond, acting in dozens of films, recording songs and modelling.
She left cinema in the 1970s and later became an animal rights activist — notably creating the Brigitte Bardot Foundation — and campaigning for vegetarianism, a ban on horsemeat and an end to bullfighting.
More recently, she called for the release from Greenland custody of Sea Shepherd founder and animal rights activist Paul Watson.
They first met in 1977 during an action to protect baby seals from slaughter.
AFP