Oscars omit famed French actress Brigitte Bardot from In Memoriam segment

Among those missing from the Oscars’ In Memoriam segment this year was famed French actress Brigitte Bardot. Bardot died at the age of 91 on December 28, 2025, and not long after her death was announced, her defense of French culture and identity against the "Islamic flood" the European country is facing came under fire, along with other stances she took. 

While Bardot was listed alongside the dozens of other actors, actresses, producers, and other film industry figures who died between the 2025 hosting of the annual awards show and the 2026 running, she and other notable names were missing from the expanded segment on television. Others missing from the award show included James Van Der Beek, Eric Dane, and Malcolm-Jamal Warner, who had been included on the Academy Awards' In Memoriam webpage. 

An outspoken Bardot was convicted under French hate speech laws six times over her life. She said in 1996, "And so it is that my country, France, my homeland, has once again been invaded, with the blessings of successive governments, by an overpopulation of foreigners, especially Muslims, to whom we are supposed to swear allegiance. To this Islamic flood we are supposed to submit, against our will, all of our traditions."

Bardot was fined multiple times over the years for her comments, including €15,000 in 2008 for saying the Muslim migrant population was "destroying us, destroying our country by imposing its acts," and €20,000 in 2020 for saying that the residents of a French-controlled Reunion island off the coast of Madagascar were "savages." The latter fine came about after Bardot, an animal rights activist, wrote a letter referring to the Reunionese as "natives who still have savage genes" over their treatment of animals. 

She wrote in 2003, "Over the last twenty years, we have given in to a subterranean, dangerous, and uncontrolled infiltration, which not only resists adjusting to our laws and customs but which will, as the years pass, attempt to impose its own," and wrote later that year, "We no longer have the right to be outraged when illegal immigrants or thugs profane and conquer our churches, in order to transform them into human pigsties, defecating behind the altar, pissing against the columns, spreading their nauseating smells beneath the sacred vaults of our choirs."