The sultry French actress appeared on the cover of LIFE when she was 26 years old and an international cinema star with “sparkling brown eyes and a naughty smile.”
Fifty years later, Bardot has trouble recalling the specific details of this cover shoot (by Walter Carone) and the many other LIFE features about her career that ran before and after it.
“I posed for so many photographers in my life that I no longer remember their names and faces,” Bardot wrote from Saint-Tropez, in an email interview with LIFE.com. Still, she says, “I was very proud to be a part of this world-renowned magazine.” And, looking at the many images of her that ran in LIFE — by Bill Ray, Frank Scherschel, Dmitri Kessel, and others — Bardot gets nostalgic for that time. “Between 1956 and 1968 I aged 12 years,” she writes. “I see a young girl become a woman — a freedom to live disappeared, and I never found that again.”
(see more — I Was in LIFE)
