SHORT TAKES : Bardot Only Believes in ‘Verite’

PARIS — Brigitte Bardot, French cinema’s best-known sex symbol, said today that she would not care if all but one of her dozens of films disappeared.

“Everything I appeared in during that period can disappear forever; I couldn’t care less,” Bardot, 55, told the newspaper Liberation in a rare interview.

“If only one trace of my passage on screen remained, I wish it was in ‘La Verite’ (The Truth) . . . where I truly felt I was a real actress,” said Bardot, now a leading animal rights campaigner.

Filmed in 1960 by Henri-Georges Clouzot, “La Verite” portrayed a real incident in which a young Frenchwoman murdered her lover. It won an Oscar for best foreign film.

“For me, the cinema is linked to such confusion in my (personal) life that I never wish to hear about it again and, obviously, never want to act again,” said Bardot, whose last screen appearance was in 1973.