In memoriam: Jacques Charrier (Telegraph 10/09/25)

Jacques Charrier, who has died aged 88, was a French actor and artist who endured an uncomfortable spell in the limelight as Brigitte Bardot’s second husband and the father of her only child.

The two met while shooting Christian-Jaque’s Babette Goes to War (Babette s’en va-t-en guerre, 1959), a comic romp – far removed from the star’s early provocations with first husband Roger Vadim – in which Bardot played a country girl parachuted into occupied France. Charrier was cast as the French officer who turns her head.

On paper, as on screen, they seemed an ideal, supremely photogenic pairing: the sunkissed golden girl of French popular cinema, and the handsome swain Paris Match dubbed “the man the ladies find irresistible”. They married in June 1959 and honeymooned in St. Tropez, yet relations rapidly soured: a 2022 documentary reported the pair came to blows after Charrier refused Bardot an abortion.

The resultant child, Nicolas, was born in January 1960, and would be raised by Charrier and his family; Charrier and Bardot separated soon afterwards and divorced in November 1962. Further unrest followed the publication of Bardot’s scandalous memoir Initiales BB in 1985, wherein she described her son as “a tumour” with “a negroid little face” and Charrier as “dictatorial and impulsive… a gigolo and a despicable drunk”.

Father and son won damages for violation of privacy, and Charrier published his own book, Ma réponse à Brigitte Bardot, in 1997; Bardot unsuccessfully sued to have it suppressed. “By giving my version of the facts, I’m doing her a big favour,” Charrier insisted. “The reality of her love for Nicolas, confirmed by the letters I kept, is much more to her credit than the horrors she wrote.”

Jacques Joseph Henri Charrier was born November 6, 1936 in Metz, where his soldier father had been stationed. He studied ceramics at Strasbourg’s School of Decorative Arts before pursuing acting, training at the Centre d’Art Dramatique in Paris before joining the Comédie-Française.

He made an uncredited screen debut among the arrestees in the thriller Police judiciaire (1957) but got his biggest break in the Théâtre Montparnasse’s 1958 production of The Diary of Anne Frank; one spectator was the director Marcel Carné, who cast Charrier as a rich kid in Les tricheurs (1958), a study of Left Bank mores that was a major domestic hit.

Charrier’s next role was as a cocky womaniser in Jean-Pierre Mocky’s The Chasers (Les dragueurs, 1959), opposite Charles Aznavour and Anouk Aimée; distracted by his domestic situation, he then made the misstep of turning down the Tom Ripley role in Purple Noon (Plein soleil, 1960), the Patricia Highsmith adaptation that made a star out of Alain Delon.

After his Bardot split, Charrier twice worked with Claude Chabrol: in L’avarice, the director’s contribution to the portmanteau The Seven Deadly Sins (1962), and as the obsessed journalist in The Third Lover (L’oeil du Malin, 1963). He cameoed in Agnes Varda’s Les créatures (1966) and the site-specific Hindi hit An Evening in Paris (1967), and smooched Anna Karina in Anticipation (1967), Jean-Luc Godard’s contribution to The Oldest Profession (Le plus vieux métier du monde, 1967).

Yet after the collapse of Les Films Marquise, the production company Charrier set up with fellow performer Jean-Claude Brialy, movies became a secondary concern: he took his final role as a sports journalist on TF1 drama Salut champion! (1981). By then, he had reverted to an earlier love, painting, enrolling at the Beaux-Arts de Paris school in 1980. 

Exhibitions of Charrier’s work have since been held in Geneva, San Francisco and Miami; his series of 282 paintings inspired by the Code of Hammurabi was exhibited at UNESCO Paris in 1996. His final show was a retrospective in his adopted hometown of Saint-Briac, held earlier this summer.

Relations with Bardot settled, if hardly improved. Charrier told reporters in 1997: “Years later, at La Madrague, I said to Brigitte: you gave me the most beautiful gift [in Nicolas]. [She replied] ‘What gift, what gift?’ It was beyond her.”

He is survived by his fourth wife, the photographer Makiko Kumano, and four children by three previous wives: Nicolas by Bardot, two daughters with second wife France Louis-Dreyfus, and one by third wife Linda Charrier.

Jacques Charrier, born November 6, 1936, died September 3, 2025.