Brigitte Bardot to get a statue in Saint-Tropez
French screen goddess Brigitte Bardot will be be honoured Thursday in the Riviera resort of St Tropez, where a 2.5-metre (eight-foot) statue of the actress will be unveiled on her 83rd birthday. Bardot became synonymous with the town after she helped put it on the map in her breakthrough role as a semi-naked seductress in the 1956 film "And God Created Woman". The film was shot in St Tropez when it was still a bohemian fishing village. Bardot moved there in 1958, with international jet-setters in hot pursuit. She gave up her film career in 1973 and withdrew to her secluded home on the outskirts of the town to devote herself to promoting animal rights. The bronze statue commissioned by St Tropez is based on an Italian illustrator's drawings of a curvaceous young Bardot -- the muse of such filmmakers as Roger Vadim (her first husband), Jean-Luc Godard and Louis Malle. The reclusive Bardot is not expected to attend the unveiling ceremony. In a hand-written note, she thanked the town for the "immense honour" of the "magnificent statue immortalising the woman that God created in Saint-Tropez!!" "I'm sending you all huge thanks, with tears in my eyes," she wrote.
