Brigitte Bardot and the complexity of mourning celebrity

It conjures the age-old question of how we separate the art from the artist. We ask ourselves whether there is an ethical way to enjoy certain things a person left behind whilst neatly avoiding others.

Woody Allen still enjoys a life outside of prison despite various accusations made against him and his highly controversial relationship with wife Soon-Yi Previn. Chris Brown continues to fill stadiums even after violently attacking his ex-partner Rihanna in 2009. Look back at the canon of art, music, theatre and film, you’ll have filled a basket with bad apples before you know it.

But Bardot’s death feels different. Not because she was uniquely harmful, but because her passing exposed a growing refusal to engage in the polite forgetting that celebrity culture once relied upon.

When a famous person dies, we are conditioned to respond with respect, if not silence. There is an unspoken rule that death absolves, or at least softens, moral scrutiny. But for many younger audiences, mourning is no longer automatic. This instinct increasingly clashes with a digital culture that archives everything, and an internet that remembers what we might prefer to forget.

This is not about demanding moral purity from public figures, nor about retroactively cancelling the dead. It is about resisting the urge to flatten a life into a highlight reel when we’re blinded by stardom. To acknowledge that Bardot could be both a feminist icon to some and a symbol of exclusion to others is a necessary interrogation of our collective amnesia.

Celebrity culture thrives by selling us archetypes: the rebel, the muse, the humanitarian. But complexity disrupts the fantasy. And so we are often asked to choose one version of a person and stick with it.

But perhaps the more honest response to a death like Bardot’s is discomfort. Mourning, after all, does not have to be an endorsement. And criticism does not negate grief. If we are going to continue elevating cultural figures to mythic status, we should at least be willing to tell the whole story. Not just what they gave us, but what they took from others.

Many of us will write ‘Rest in Peace Brigitte Bardot’ and share neat soundbites on our social media profiles in the coming weeks. And yet Ms Bardot will not be missed. The world may have been changed by her work, but it will be a better place without her politics.

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