The passing of a cultural icon often serves as a stark marker of time, a personal milestone that measures our own journey. The death of French actress and animal rights activist Brigitte Bardot at 91 has delivered such a moment for The Canberra Times columnist Ian Warden, now 80, who vividly recalls the young starlet becoming his very first pin-up.
A Personal Signpost on the Journey of Ageing
Warden reflects that a profound sign of ageing is witnessing the death, from old age, of one's first adolescent pin-up. For him, that was the teenage "sex-kitten" starlet Brigitte Bardot, who shimmered into his life in the 1950s when he was a pre-pubescent boy in England. In an era before the internet, smitten youths would literally cut pictures from magazines and pin them to their walls. Bardot's image, cut from a publication, found a place among Warden's gallery of steam engines and dogs—an irony about a "sex kitten" among puppies that only struck him decades later.
He emphasises the innocence of that early admiration. It was her face—boyish yet girlish, angelic yet demonic, exotically French—framed by voluminous hair, that captivated him, not any sordid sexuality. Her death prompted feelings of fond, pure, sentimental nostalgia and admiration for her later-life work as a tireless animal rights champion.
Idols as Furniture in the Rooms of Our Lives
Warden muses on how certain idols prop up and enrich our lives at specific, often happier, stages. Bardot loomed large for his generation at the carefree age of 10 or 11, a time just before the full, life-altering storm of puberty. He envies J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, the eternal child spared the "satanic onslaught" of puberty and the subsequent adult burdens of sexuality, debt, voting, and ageing.
The columnist contrasts this with other signs of growing older, like noticing ever-younger police officers or, more "shirtfronting," the appointment of progressively younger popes. He notes that until last year's election of the now 70-year-old Pope Leo XIV, pontiffs seemed anciently fossilised. Now, Christendom is led by a man a boyish decade younger than Warden himself.
A Legacy Beyond the Pin-Up
While Bardot's early career was defined by her beauty and status as a sex symbol, Warden admires her evolution. After a necessarily brief time as an object of desire, she reinvented herself as a feisty and tireless advocate for animal rights. In her twilight years, she was known for holding and proclaiming politically incorrect views with sincere conviction.
Her death serves as a reminder that "time, like an ever rolling stream, bears all our idols and pin-ups away." For Warden and his contemporaries, Bardot was a beautiful, exotic presence at a pivotal and joyful time—a pin-up whose passing startles us, as if we expected our human furniture to remain forever unchanged.
The news of her death, reported on January 17, 2026, is a poignant cue for older readers to ask themselves: whom did you pin up?
