Tag: Brigitte Bardot

Listen to The French Connection ::  December 28, 2025

Bardot

DECEMBER 28, 2025 SALUT!

  • Boris Vian “J’Suis Snob”

REST IN PEACE, B.B.
“I gave my beauty and my youth to men, and now I am giving my wisdom and experience … the best of me, to animals.”

  • Brigitte Bardot “La Madrague” (1963)
  • Brigitte Bardot & Serge Gainsbourg “Bonnie & Clyde” (Serge Gainsbourg) (1967)

POST-WAR CHANSON
Smoky cafés, cobblestone streets, and a deep longing for a pre-war idealized Paris

  • Léo Ferré “Noël” (1961)
  • Catherine Sauvage “Avec Le Temps”
  • Léo Ferré “Le Vampire” (Baudelaire)
  • Barbara “Göttingen” (Monique Andrée Serf)
  • Barbara “Les Voyages” (Monique Andrée Serf)
  • Barbara “Ne Me quitte Pas (Jacques Brel)
  • Jacques Brel “Quand on n’a que l’amour” (Brel)
  • George Brassens “La Prière” (Francis Jammes / Brassens)
  • George Brassens “Le Piere Noël et le Petit Fille” (Brassens)
  • Catherine Sauvage “Black Trombone” (Serge Gainsbourg)
  • Léo Ferré “Saint Germaine des Pres” (Ferré)

Source: The French Connection :: Playlist and replay – WRIU 90.3 FM

French actress and animal rights activist Brigitte Bardot has died : NPR

Legendary screen siren and animal rights activist Brigitte Bardot has died at age 91. The alluring former model starred in numerous movies, often playing the highly sexualized love interest.

By Elizabeth Blair

Brigitte Bardot, the international sex goddess of cinema in the 1950s and ’60s, has died aged 91. Bardot’s animal rights foundation announced her death in a statement to news agency Agence France-Presse on Sunday, without specifying the time or place of death.

Stylish and seductive, Bardot exuded a kind of free sexuality, rare in the buttoned-up 1950s. She modeled, made movies, influenced fashion around the world and recorded albums. She married four times. Her list of lovers famously included Warren Beatty, Nino Ferrer and singer-songwriter-producer Serge Gainsbourg, with whom she recorded the French hit Bonnie and Clyde.

As an actor, Bardot worked with some of France’s leading directors including Henri-Georges Clouzot in La Vérité (The Truth), Jean-Luc Godard in Le Mépris (Contempt) and Louis Malle in Viva Maria!

Born Catholic to an upper-middle-class couple in Paris in 1934, Bardot studied ballet and modeled before becoming an actor. As a teenager, she appeared several times on the cover of Elle magazine, attracting the attention of Roger Vadim who was six years her senior. The two married in 1952. Bardot’s parents made them wait until she turned 18.

Vadim, an aspiring director, has been credited with turning Bardot into the iconic sex symbol she became. In his 1957 film And God Created Woman, Bardot plays a provocative young woman on a quest for sexual liberation.

Vadim wanted Bardot’s appearances in his films to shake off sexual taboos. He once said that he wanted to “kill the myth, this odd rule in Christian morality, that sex must be coupled with guilt.”

Source: French actress and animal rights activist Brigitte Bardot has died : NPR

Listen to “The French Connection” Ep. 8

This Sunday’s FRENCH CONNECTION on WRIU 90.3 FM mourns the end of Summer with a theme, “Seasons in the Sun”

By Michael Stevenson

( This program originally aired on WRIU, Kingston, 90.3 FM on Sunday, August 24 )

“Seasons in the Sun” playlist, THE FRENCH CONNECTION :: WRIU 90.3 FM :: August 24, 2025:
  • Gilbert Bécaud “Plein Soleil” (1964)
  • Brigitte Bardot “La Madrague” (1963)
  • Yael Naem “Playground Family / You Have Always Been” (from the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack Mon Bébé)  2019
  • Jeanne Cherhal “Canicule” (2006)
  • Françoise Hardy “Soleil” (1970)
  • Toots Thielmans “Theme From Summer of ’42” (M. Legrand) rec. 1987 live concert
  • Yves Montand “Les Feuilles Mortes” (m.Jacques Prévert, l.Joseph Kosma) lyrics for “The Autumn Leaves” by Johnny Mercer (recorded 1952)
  • This Is the Kit “Recommencer” (Kate Stables, 2021)
  • Henri Salvador “Jardin d’Hiver” (Henri Salvador, Keren Ann & Benjamin Biolay, 2000)
  • Django Rheinhardt & the Quintet of the Hot Club of France “September Song” (m.Kurt Weil, l.Maxwell Anderson) recorded 1947
  • Blossom Dearie “It Might As Well Be Spring” (Rogers & Hammerstein, recorded 1957)
  • Jack Kerouac “October” (reading)
  • Francis Cabrel “Octobre” (1994)
  • Black Box Recorder “Seasons in the Sun” (Jacques Brel, recorded 1998)
  • Camille Saint-Saëns “Carnival of the Animals” (composed 1886)

I Tell You It Is October!
by Jack Kerouac

There’s something olden and golden and lost
In the strange ancestral light,
There’s something tender and loving and sad
In October’s copper might.

End of something, old, old, old…
Always missing, sad, sad, sad…
Saying something…love, love, love…

Akh! I tell you it is October,
And I defy you now and always
To deny there is not love

Staring foolishly at skies
Whose beauty but God defies.

For in October’s ancient glow
A little after dusk
Love strides through the meadow
Dropping her burnished husk…

“I Tell You It Is October” appears in Jack Kerouac Collected Poems, published by The Library of America in 2012

Jane Birkin on making ‘Je T’Aime…’

Music lovers: Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg in Paris, 1969
It was the year a female orgasm made it to the top of the charts. In 1969, Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin’s “Je T’Aime… Moi Non Plus” became the first banned record and the first foreign-language

t was the year a female orgasm made it to the top of the charts. In 1969, Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin’s “Je T’Aime… Moi Non Plus” became the first banned record and the first foreign-language single to reach No 1 in the UK. It still is, uniquely for such a pop hit, an erotic sound-collage of two people having sex.

Over a sultry, repetitive tune from a cheesy organ, the 22-year-old Birkin breathes, “je t’aime, je t’aime…”, while the 40-year-old Gainsbourg louchely growls “moi non plus” (“me neither”). It builds, via increasingly heavy breathing, to Birkin’s orgasmic chorusing of “tu vas, tu vas et tu viens/ entre mes reins” (“you come, you come and you go/ between my kidneys”). Yes, the words: I’ll come to them. Continue reading “Jane Birkin on making ‘Je T’Aime…’” →