Brigitte Bardot’s final words revealed as grieving husband gives her cause of death

Bernard d’Ormale said his wife of 30 years underwent two procedures to treat a cancer diagnosis. She was recovering but was rushed to hospital again late in November.

He revealed his wife’s final words, telling Paris Match:  “They were the most moving moment of my life with Brigitte, because she was leaving us.

“She said ‘pew pew’. I was half asleep, I sat up and saw that she had stopped breathing.”

The two words were a phrase she used as a “little word of love,” according to the Brigitte Bardot foundation.

“I saw her suffering disappear in the next fifteen minutes – she became magnificent,” her husband added.

Celebrities are gathering today for her funeral at a service in Saint Tropez.

The ceremony will be broadcast live on large screens sso fans can say their final goodbyes.

She will instead be buried at the Marine Cemetery in St Tropez, close to the grave of her first husband, director Roger Vadim, who died in 2000, aged 72.

The celebrated actor and singer became an international sex symbol before leaving the film industry to become an animal rights activist.

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Bardot shot to international fame with the 1956 film 'And God Created Woman', which was written and directed by her then-husband Vadim.

She announced her retirement from acting in the early 1970s and became increasingly active politically.

Bardot had racked up a string of convictions for inciting racial hatred and she openly supported the far-right political group Front National.

She shared her rightwing politics and criticised gay men and lesbians, schoolteachers and the so-called “Islamisation of French society”, resulting in a conviction for inciting racial hatred, in her 2003 book A Cry in the Silence.

French President Emmanuel Macron described her as “a legend of the century”.

On X, he wrote: “Her films, her voice, her dazzling glory, her initials, her sorrows, her generous passion for animals, her face that became Marianne, Brigitte Bardot embodied a life of freedom.

“A French existence, universal brilliance. She touched us. We mourn a legend of the century.”

Born in 1934 in Paris, Bardot grew up in a prosperous, traditional Catholic family but excelled enough as a dancer to be allowed to study ballet, gaining a place at the prestigious Conservatoire de Paris.

She found work as a model, appearing on the cover of Elle in 1950 while still 15.

She was offered film roles as a result of her modelling. It was at one audition that she met Vadim, whom she would marry in 1952, after she turned 18.

Bardot was cast in small roles, with increasing prominence; she played Dirk Bogarde’s love interest in Doctor at Sea, a big hit in the UK in 1955.

But it was Vadim’s And God Created Woman, in which she played a teenager in Saint-Tropez, that turned her into an international icon.

The film was a huge hit in France, as well as internationally, and catapulted Bardot into the spotlight.

A statement released by the Brigitte Bardot Foundation says: "The Brigitte Bardot Foundation announces with immense sadness the death of its founder and president, Madame Brigitte Bardot, a world-renowned actress and singer, who chose to abandon her prestigious career to dedicate her life and energy to animal welfare and her foundation."