She is 77 years old and dresses always in black—black blouse and black jeans, never a skirt, never a dress. She wears her hair in a large bun, like a crown, and styles the hair herself. She applies her own makeup. Because she suffers from arthritis and other ailments, she sometimes uses a cane; an operation would help, but she fears the anesthesia. She lives at La Madrague, a secluded property in St. Tropez, which she has owned for more than 50 years, and she guards her privacy zealously and devotes her energies to animal rights. When I visited her there recently, she sipped champagne in the salon and made an offhand reference to her “faded beauty.” The sentiment was sincere, though the reality was frankly unconvincing. Much more persuasive was what she said about her life and her career: “If I upset some notions and went against established rules, that wasn’t part of what I wanted to do. It wasn’t my goal.”

Brigitte Bardot bought La Madrague in 1958. She had left the set of The Woman and the Puppet and come down for the weekend on the Blue Train; the only notary in St. Tropez opened his office on a Sunday in order to close the deal. The property, shrouded in bamboo and lavender and pine, had been owned by an old woman, and the main building was unprepossessing—part boathouse, part fisherman’s shack. Bardot brought in water, gas, electricity, and her fiancé of the moment. In those early days there would be costume parties and gypsy dances in the sand. But the real appeal of the setting was something more enduring. La Madrague (the name refers to the traps once set out by local fishermen) lay on a dirt road at one end of the Bay of Canoubiers, well off the beaten track—it was all but certain to remain a sanctuary, far from the crowds that would soon engulf the South of France.

Today, Bardot lives at La Madrague with her husband of 20 years, Bernard d’Ormale, a former businessman who now mainly devotes himself to his wife. Visitors are rare: the lady of the house is not eager for guests. La Madrague is a peaceable enclave, perfumed by wild herbs and flowers. Decades ago, the walls kept throngs of fans and photographers at bay. It is quieter now. On the outside of the surrounding wall is a small trough for dogs, the basin continually freshened with water. The house itself lies beyond the dark-blue gate, overlooking the sea, its walls covered with clematis and wisteria. Inside, the furnishings are bohemian and eclectic, very casual and somehow frozen in time. A dozen dogs and cats roam the property. In the garden, under wooden crosses, lie cats and dogs who have departed.

Bardot had known this area for many years: her parents owned a vacation house in St. Tropez, and she spent summers here with her younger sister. Born into a family of means, Bardot began taking dance classes at the age of seven with the aim of becoming a ballerina. After 10 years en pointe she acquired an effortless allure. Bardot’s modeling career began when she started posing for friends of her mother, who designed hats. Photographs were taken—and noticed. In 1950, at the age of 15, she graced the cover of French Elle, which led, in 1952, to her marriage to the director Roger Vadim and the first of 40 movies. The movies initially were lighthearted romantic comedies, the plots interchangeable and forgettable. “I don’t think I was a good comedian,” Bardot says. “I contented myself to express what people asked me to interpret, and giving it my best.” But the story lines were hardly the point. On the screen the world discovered a young woman with a swan’s neck, a luscious figure, and an ostentatious bouffant who combined youth, sex, flirtatiousness, insolence, and grace, all wrapped up in a bewildering nonchalance—a heady mix. She was a new kind of blonde bombshell, a phenomenon that a world still recovering from the nightmare of war didn’t quite know it was waiting for.

Then, in 1956, Vadim offered her the astonishing role of the fierce and savage Juliette in … And God Created Woman. The movie was poorly received in France—its sensational depiction of a small-town siren and her effect on the men around her rubbed a conservative culture the wrong way—but it triumphed in the U.S. After four years and 15 roles, Bardot had reached the top in a serious film. “In fact, I owe everything to the Americans,” she explains. Ironically, she never made a movie in the United States, and she starred alongside very few American actors (Kirk Douglas being one of them). The success of … And God Created Woman did not bring Bardot the sort of personal satisfaction one might have anticipated. “All my life,” she says, “during that film, and before and after, I was never what I wanted to be, which was frank, honest, and straightforward. I wasn’t scandalous—I didn’t want to be. I wanted to be myself. Only myself.”

In 1973, Bardot decided to bring her acting career to an end and begin a second life. Her screen image would henceforward be preserved in amber at a certain age, as it had been for Garbo and Monroe. “I was really sick of it,” Bardot says. “Good thing I stopped, because what happened to Marilyn Monroe and Romy Schneider would have happened to me.” Over the years she had turned down roles opposite Frank Sinatra, Steve McQueen (Faye Dunaway took the part in The Thomas Crown Affair), and Marlon Brando (leaving a million-dollar paycheck on the table). When she was on location, making movies, she had often found herself picking up stray animals, even goats and sheep, destined for the pound or the slaughterhouse, and going as far as to shelter them in her hotel room. Perhaps it should not have been a surprise that she decided to dedicate herself to animal rights, and to the idea that animals deserve respect as living beings and are not merely a source of profit.

“It’s what I dreamed of,” Bardot says now. “It’s what I always wanted.” She threw herself seriously into the animal-rights campaign beginning in 1977, with her efforts to end the killing of baby seals in Canada. She has stepped in to oppose the transport and slaughter of horses, vivisection, bullfights, industrial animal farms, hunting, the wearing of fur. To support the cause, Bardot sold many of her personal effects at auction—her dresses, her souvenirs, and even some of her jewelry, including a diamond ring, ruby bracelets, and a pearl necklace given to her by the German millionaire Gunter Sachs, her third husband. (“I never get hung up on the past—the memories are too negative.”) Bardot’s work is embodied in the Brigitte Bardot Foundation for the Welfare and Protection of Animals, based in Paris. She does not use a computer but is in constant communication with the foundation the old-fashioned way, writing in blue ink on blue sheets of paper that bear only the words “La Madrague, Saint-Tropez, 83990.” She works by a window at a rustic Provence table with a checked tablecloth. To her signature she adds a little daisy. “I don’t feel old or used up,” she says, “and I don’t have time to waste thinking about aging, because I live only for my cause. Today, there are more regulations on cars than for animals.”

From her home, she distributes good and bad marks to politicians around the world. Bardot is passionate and outspoken, and she has made controversial remarks on subjects such as immigration (a sensitive issue in France), and found herself in court as a result. But she is not a political person. “I am not playing political games,” she says. “I don’t care. I don’t bother with that. I belong to no party and I am militant for no one. All of my causes, including the most radical, are motivated by the defense of animals.” During the past few weeks, she has written to Paul Watson, a co-founder of Greenpeace, whose Sea Shepherd Conservation Society combats Japanese whale-hunters from a fleet of ships. (One of the boats carries Bardot’s name.) She has written to the French minister of foreign affairs, asking him to keep pressure on Japan, and to the French minister of agriculture, to call attention to the horrors of the slaughterhouses. She has even written to Vladimir Putin (Bardot is his favorite actress) to thank him for taking steps to protect wolves and for enacting a ban on the sealskin trade. She anticipates and dismisses a raised eyebrow at the overture to Putin: “I don’t care about looking conservative and awkward. I’m only looking to assuage my soul and protect the animals.”

Bardot doesn’t leave La Madrague except to spend time at another house, La Garrigue, in the hills a few miles away, where she maintains a small chapel, and keeps horses, donkeys, cows, and pigs. She has not set foot in the port of St. Tropez itself for more than 10 years; Jean-Michel, a stylist there, comes out occasionally to cut her hair. “I’m attached to the St. Tropez that I once knew,” Bardot says. “The old St. Tropez.” She is secluded but hardly a recluse: “I don’t refuse the world but its promiscuity.” She reads Le Figaro every morning and does the crossword puzzle. She listens only to Radio Classique. Ask about the writers she likes, and she will mention Milan Kundera, Bernard Clavel, and Konrad Lorenz. She is flattered by the exhibition of photographs that will open in Los Angeles in February and travel to Sofitel hotels around the country, but she will not be in attendance. Emphatically, Bardot does not live a Sunset Boulevard kind of life, trapped in her own legend. You will not find her engrossed in her old movies. As she herself sees it, she is in the prime of life. “The other day,” she said, “I came across … And God Created Woman on TV, which I haven’t seen in ages. I told myself that that girl wasn’t bad. But it was like it was someone other than me. I have better things to do than study myself on a screen.”