BRIGITTE A POLITICAL ANIMAL

Her sometimes incendiary political views can arguably be traced back to the 1992 marriage with Mr D'Ormale. It brought her into the orbit of the political right and led to associations with the National Front leader and voice of the anti-immigration movement in France, Jean-Marie Le Pen. The link encouraged Bar-dot to lay bare some private thoughts on the policies of French governments that surely were better left unsaid.

The trouble she has generated has also proved an unfortunate distraction from her animal rights campaigning.

It first surfaced in 1998, when a court found her guilty of inciting racial hatred after making public comments about civilian massacres in Algeria. Only four months earlier, another court had fined her for claiming that France was being overrun by "sheep- slaughtering Muslims".

Such reprimands had little effect. In 2003, she published a book entitled A Scream in the Silence, which brought more accusations of both anti-Muslim and anti-gay bigotry. She denounced interracial marriage, called homosexuals "fairground freaks" and assaulted the government for being over-generous to the unemployed and to immigrants.

Fining her pounds 4,000 this time, a court said that in her book, Bar-dot "presents Muslims as barbaric and cruel invaders, responsible for terrorist acts and eager to dominate the French to the extent of wanting to exterminate them".

While not present for the verdict, she had tearfully defended herself to the court a few weeks before. "I was born in 1934' at that time interracial marriage wasn't approved. There are many new languages in the new Europe. Mediocrity is taking over from beauty and splendour. There are many people who are filthy, badly dressed and badly shaven."

She later made an attempt at social rehabilitation at least among the gay and lesbian community of France with a letter to a French gay magazine that may or may not have been well-advised. "Apart from my husband - who maybe will cross over one day as well - I am entirely surrounded by homos," she wrote. "For years, they have been my support, my friends, my adopted children, my confidants."

In Canada this week, however, Bardot has returned to her true calling for the past three decades by tackling the new conservative government of Stephen Harper over the imminent seal cull in the Gulf of St Lawrence.

It was in Canada that it all started. The last time she travelled there was in 1977, and the cause, as now, was the protection of the harp seals. She was famously photographed embracing a seal pup, a blatant attempt to win over public sentiment against the eastern Canadian hunting industry.

"I am not crazy," a tearful Bar-dot told a packed press conference in Ottawa, the Canadian capital, earlier this week. "I am pleading with you. This will likely be my last visit to Canada before I die. I want to see this barbaric massacre stopped before I die." Her appeal followed a similar visit to Canada last month, also in the name of the harp seal, by Paul McCartney and his wife, Heather Mills McCartney.