Brigitte Bardot never wanted to be a mother, something she candidly revealed in her memoir Initiales B.B.. But in 1960, she gave birth to her son Nicolas, from her second husband, Jacques Charrier. Bardot compared her pregnancy to a “tumor” and wrote that she was not mature enough to raise a child. Yet, after the death of the French cinema icon, Nicolas became the main heir to her estate.
In her memoirs, Bardot caused a stir by admitting that she had never been mature enough to raise a child. The star also confessed that she never wanted to become a mother.
Bardot described her pregnancy in extremely harsh terms:
“I looked in the mirror at my flat, slender stomach as if it were a dear friend over whom I was about to close the coffin lid.”
Her only son, Nicolas, was born in Paris on January 11, 1960, during a home birth. After Bardot divorced Charrier in 1962, custody officially remained with the father. However, Nicolas mostly lived with Charrier’s parents, his grandparents.
“I did not raise Nicolas because I myself needed support, roots,” Bardot later admitted. “I couldn’t be a pillar for him because I myself had been completely uprooted, unbalanced, and lost in that crazy world.”
Before the release of Initiales B.B., Nicolas and Jacques tried to legally remove passages about them from the book. They were unsuccessful, and the sections where Bardot described her son as “the object of my unhappiness” became some of the most talked-about parts of the memoir.
In the book, Bardot also revealed two previous abortions, one of which nearly became fatal. She admitted that she had attempted suicide, as Charrier had forbidden her from acting so she could give birth.
“I wanted to be free—in every sense of the word… I was a prisoner of my overly famous name and Jacques’s possessive nature, a prisoner of my body, my face, and my child,” she wrote.
It’s worth noting that both her son and ex-husband were so shocked by Bardot’s revelations that they sued her for invasion of privacy—and they won! The actress was ordered to pay a $40,000 fine.
Despite the icy relationship, over the years Bardot eventually began communicating with Nicolas. She even visited him in Norway. In the summer of 2024, Bardot admitted that she had promised Nicolas never to discuss him in the press again—and she kept that promise until the end of her life.
