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Iconic French actress Brigitte Bardot has been hospitalised, according to the country’s media outlets.
The film star, 91, is said to have been there for three weeks with a ‘serious illness’ although no further clarification has been made.
Brigitte was staying at her home in Saint-Tropez when she was admitted to a hospital in Toulon.
It has been claimed that she underwent surgery and is currently recovering and doctors will continue to monitor her condition.
Daily Mail have contacted Brigitte’s representatives for comment.
The actress made her breakthrough in 1952 in the film The Girl In The Bikini and became one of the most famous French postwar film stars.
Brigitte Bardot, 91, has been admitted to hospital in Saint-Tropez with a serious illness and has undergone surgery (pictured in 2011)
The film star, 91, is said to have been there for three weeks with a ‘serious illness’ although no further clarification has been made (pictured in a 1969 movie Les Femmes )
In 1956, Brigitte starred alongside her estranged husband Roger Vadim’s And God Created Woman, which, despite the Hollywood censors’ cuts, became the highest-grossing foreign film ever released in the US.
The Parisian wasn’t a movie newbie, having already starred in several films and earned the nickname ‘sex kitten’.
American theatre managers were arrested for showing her on-screen exploits, but the press outrage only enticed viewers. In 1957, priests in New York told people not to view Bardot’s films. The Vatican, which six years later accused Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton of ‘erotic vagrancy’, condemned Bardot as ‘evil’.
‘There lies Brigitte,’ one critic grumbled, ‘stretched from end to end of the screen, bottoms up and bare as a censor’s eyeball,’ in a review meant to appeal to morality. The queues for tickets just grew longer.
The controversy did her career no harm. Bardot acted in more than 45 films and recorded more than 70 songs before retiring in the early 1970s.
John Lennon was famously a huge fan of the French star with her poster on his childhood bedroom wall, the two briefly met in 1968.
Born on September 28, 1934, in Paris, she initially trained as a ballet dancer at the National Superior Conservatory of Paris for Music and Dance.
At 15, Brigette had already appeared on the front cover of France’s Elle magazine and began to establish herself as a model.
Brigitte was staying at her home in Saint-Tropez when she was admitted to a hospital in Toulon (pictured 2007)
It has been claimed that she underwent surgery and is currently recovering and doctors will continue to monitor her condition (pictured 1961)
The actress made her breakthrough in 1952 in the film The Girl In The Bikini and became one of the most famous French postwar film stars (pictured 1969)
Her acting career began in 1952 when she starred in a series of obscure roles, but she soon began to turn heads at the Cannes Film Festival in 1953 when she frolicked on the beach in a skimpy bikini.
She said: ‘Yes, I knew I was ugly as a child. I said to myself: “Well, I am ugly, so I must at least be bright and funny and have other things to compensate.”
‘I knew I had to be the best at something, otherwise I would be nothing. I knew I wanted the world to know about Brigitte Bardot.’
Never one for tradition, she posed for a nude spread in Playboy to celebrate her 40th birthday.
She created the Bardot pose, where she sat with her legs crossed in just a pair of black stockings, and the Bardot neckline was named after her because she made the style famous.
Brigette has been married four times to Roger Vadim (1952-57), Jacques Charrier (1959-62), Gunter Sachs (1966-69) and Bernard d’Ormale, who she married in 1992.
She welcomed a son, Nicolas-Jacques Charrier, with her second husband in 1960.
Speaking about motherhood she said: ‘I’m not made to be a mother. I don’t know why I think this because I adore animals and I adore children, but I’m not adult enough – I know it’s horrible to have to admit that, but I’m not adult enough to take care of a child.
Quitting acting in 1973, her took her life in a different direction and she set up the Brigitte Bardot Foundation in 1986, she was a dedicated vegetarian and regularly campaigned for the rights of animals.
In 2013 she threatened to request Russian citizenship and leave France after a pair of 42-year-old elephants were refused treatment for TB in a Lyon zoo.
She referred to France as a ‘graveyard for animals’ but ultimately won the case and saved the two former circus animals.
In 2001 she also donated £96,671 over two years to sterilise and adopt 300,000 of Bucharest’s stray dogs.
Not all of her activism work since quitting acting was quite so well received.
In 2004 she was convicted by a French court and fined £4,000 for ‘inciting racial hatred’ in her book A Scream in the Silence.
She supported in Marine Le Pen in the 2017 French elections and told people not to vote for Emmanuel Macron because he had a ‘coldness’ in his ‘steel eyes’.
‘Brigitte Bardot’s husband is a friend of Jean-Marie Le Pen, but neither of them is a party member. Bardot is not racist and not an extreme-right activist,’ Marie-Dominique Lelièvre, a close friend, said. ‘Bardot is Bardot, she defies definition.’