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Brigitte Bardot, the French actor and singer who became an international sex symbol before turning her back on the film industry and embracing the cause of animal rights activism and far-right politics, has died aged 91.

Paying tribute to Bardot on Sunday, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, wrote on social media that France was mourning “a legend of the century”.

“Her films, her voice, her dazzling glory … her sorrows, her generous passion for animals, her face that became Marianne, Brigitte Bardot embodied a life of freedom,” Macron said.

Bardot’s death, at her Saint-Tropez home, La Madrague, on the French Riviera, was announced by her foundation. “The Brigitte Bardot Foundation announces with immense sadness the death of its founder and president, Madame Brigitte Bardot, a world-renowned actress and singer, who chose to abandon her prestigious career to dedicate her life and energy to animal welfare and her foundation,” it said.

Her cause of death was not made public. Bardot was briefly hospitalised in October for what her office called a “minor” procedure.

The town hall in Saint-Tropez, where Bardot had holidayed as a child and where she later shot the film And God Created Woman, said the actor had “helped make Saint-Tropez shine across the world”.

The town said Bardot was its “most radiant ambassador” and part of “the collective memory of Saint-Tropez, which we must preserve”.

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Bardot shot to international fame in 1956 with And God Created Woman, written and directed by her then husband, Roger Vadim, and for the next two decades was said to have embodied the idea of the archetypal “sex kitten”. In the early 1970s, however, she announced her retirement from acting and became an outspoken campaigner on animal rights, and increasingly active politically on the far right.

Bardot’s incendiary comments about ethnic minorities, immigration, Islam and homosexuality resulted in a string of convictions for inciting racial hatred. French courts fined her six times between 1997 and 2008 for her comments, particularly those targeting France’s Muslim community. In one case, a Paris court fined her €15,000 (£13,000) for describing Muslims as “this population that is destroying us, destroying our country by imposing its acts”.

Jordan Bardella, the president of Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party (RN), which Bardot supported, wrote: “Brigitte Bardot was a woman of heart, conviction and character. An ardent patriot, devoted to animals that she protected throughout her life, she embodied a whole French era, but also above all a certain idea of courage and freedom.”

Le Pen, whom Bardot once described as “the Joan of Arc of the 21st century”, wrote on social media that Bardot was “exceptional for her talent, courage, frankness and beauty”. “She was incredibly French,” she said. “Free, indomitable, whole. She will be hugely missed.”

Such was Bardot’s role in the far right’s cultural pantheon that tributes were also paid to her from Italy’s government, where the deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini, called her “a timeless star, but above all a woman who was free, nonconformist, protagonist of courageous battles in defence of our traditions”.

The Italian culture minister, Alessandro Giuli, said: “Brigitte Bardot was not only one of the great protagonists of world cinema, but also an extraordinary interpreter of western fundamental freedoms.” He said she “resolutely defended her vision of cultural and social values and civic engagement”.

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Born in 1934 in Paris, Bardot grew up in a prosperous, traditional Catholic family but excelled enough as a dancer to be allowed to study ballet, gaining a place at the prestigious Conservatoire de Paris. At the same time she found work as a model, appearing on the cover of Elle in 1950 while still 15. As a result of her modelling work, she was offered film roles; at one audition she met Vadim, whom she would marry in 1952, after she turned 18. Bardot was cast in small roles, with increasing prominence, playing Dirk Bogarde’s love interest in Doctor at Sea, a big hit in the UK in 1955.

But it was Vadim’s And God Created Woman, in which Bardot played an uninhibited teenager in Saint-Tropez, that consolidated her image and turned her into an international icon. The film was a huge hit in France, as well as internationally, and catapulted Bardot into the front rank of French screen performers.

As well as for cinema audiences, Bardot swiftly became an inspiration for intellectuals and artists; not least the young John Lennon and Paul McCartney, who demanded their then girlfriends dye their hair blond in imitation of her. The columnist Raymond Cartier wrote a lengthy article about “le cas Bardot” in Paris-Match in 1958, while Simone de Beauvoir published her famous essay Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome in 1959, framing the actor as France’s most liberated woman. In 1969, Bardot was chosen as the first real-life model for Marianne, the symbol of the French republic.

In the early 1960s, Bardot appeared in a string of high-profile French films, including Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Oscar-nominated drama The Truth, Louis Malle’s Very Private Affair (opposite Marcello Mastroianni) and Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt. In the second half of the decade, Bardot took up a number of Hollywood offers: these included Viva Maria!, a Mexican-set period comedy with Jeanne Moreau, and Shalako, a western with Sean Connery.

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Bardot also had a parallel music career, which included recording the original version of Serge Gainsbourg’s Je T’Aime … Moi Non Plus, which Gainsbourg had written for her while they were having an extramarital affair. (Afraid of scandal after her then husband, Gunter Sachs, found out, Bardot asked Gainsbourg not to release it. He went on to re-record it with Jane Birkin, to huge commercial success.)

Bardot found the pressure of stardom increasingly irksome, telling the Guardian in 1996: “The madness which surrounded me always seemed unreal. I was never really prepared for the life of a star.” She retired from acting in 1973, aged 39, after making the historical romance The Edifying and Joyous Story of Colinot. Her primary focus became animal welfare activism, joining protests against seal hunts in 1977 and establishing the Brigitte Bardot Foundation in 1986.

Bardot subsequently sent letters of protest to world leaders over issues such as dog extermination in Romania, dolphin killing in the Faroe Islands and cat slaughter in Australia. She also regularly aired outspoken views on religious animal slaughter. In her 2003 book A Cry in the Silence she espoused rightwing politics and took aim at gay men and lesbians, schoolteachers and the so-called “Islamisation of French society”, resulting in a conviction for inciting racial hatred.

Bardot was married four times: to Vadim between 1952 and 1957; Jacques Charrier between 1959 and 1962, with whom she had a son, Nicolas, in 1960; Sachs from 1966-69; and to the former Le Pen adviser Bernard d’Ormale, whom she married in 1992. She also embarked on a number of high-profile relationships, including with Jean-Louis Trintignant and Gainsbourg.