I never met Brigitte Bardot but, like half the boys I knew, I had her picture on my wall when I was at boarding school.

It would be hard to convey to a Gen Zer just how iconic she was in the 1970s as a universal symbol of female beauty. And, as such, of the so-called sexual revolution of the ’60s and ’70s.

She was an actress and a singer, appearing in nearly 50 films and singing some 60 songs, but I’ve barely seen or heard a single one – apart from this:

Neither film nor music was really the source of her fame. It was based solely on her physical perfection.

I only recently discovered  with Bardot’s duets with Serge Gainsbourg by accident while I was hunting for his hit single version of Je T’Aime… Moi Non Plus with Jane Birkin.

Only then did I learn that Gainsbourg originally wrote Je T’Aime for Bardot after she demanded compensation for a disastrous date with him.

They recorded it together late in 1967 but when Bardot’s husband found out through press reports, both he and Brigitte demanded it should be withdrawn.

Gainsbourg went on to record another version with Jane Birkin, released in 1969, while the Bardot original eventually came out in 1986.

To this day I have not seen her acting debut in And God Created Woman, the 1957 film made by her then husband, Roger Vadim.

I see now that she gave up acting in 1973 and dedicated herself to animal rights activism, in which capacity she occasionally hit the headlines, and – regrettably – racist outbursts.

She wrote a book in which she criticised racial mixing, immigration, the role of women in politics, and Islam, praising previous generations of French people for “giving their lives to push out invaders.”

More recently, in what would be her last big interview at the age of 90, she declared: “Feminism isn’t my thing. I like guys.”