Franco-British singer and actress Jane Birkin died at the age of 76, franceinfo learned this Sunday from a close family member.
Jane Birkin died at the age of 76, franceinfo learned on Sunday July 16 from a close family member. She had recently canceled for health reasons concerts in Paris scheduled for June as well as her presence at festivals this summer.
At the end of 2020, she deciphered key moments of her career at the microphone of Elodie Suigo on franceinfo, on the occasion of the release of her album Oh ! Sorry you were sleeping…
>> Singer and actress Jane Birkin, the English ingenue who stole the hearts of the French, died at 76
A “crazy journey” started in France
“A crazy journey whose beginning might not have started if I had stayed in England and if my marriage to John Barry had worked, then I would be heating up his ‘turtle soup’. Luckily for me, he walked away. I then had all the benefits of my daughter Kate and what it took to dare, to audition in Paris. This is where I came across Serge Gainsbourg. If it hadn’t been for Grimblat, I wouldn’t have been to France at all. I had a very spectacular mother and my father’s family was very respectable, I might not have dared to do much“.
A singular song: “I love you, me neither”
“It was really Serge who made me listen to the version of Je t’aime moi non plus by Brigitte Bardot. As I was very in love with him, it’s true that when he asked me if I wanted to sing it, I jumped at the chance and said yes, because I didn’t want him to get into a phone booth with any beauty that squinted a little on this project. I don’t like my voice in this song at all. When we listen again, it’s always too high pitched“.
The tragic loss of his daughter Kate
In the album Oh ! Sorry you were sleeping…she writes “My daughter got screwed up”, in tribute to her daughter, Kate Barry, who died in 2013. “VSt was impossible to start this work without having done a song or two about it so I wrote ‘My daughter got screwed up’. And then her face came back. The last time I had seen her. Even though I find it hard to listen to this song. Today there is a hole, an empty space. I keep her amazing nature of voice, she was such a funny girl, amazing fantasy, pain, melancholy and a way to take time for people when she started a center for narcotics and alcoholics. She was a person of absolute sweetness. It’s hard not to make an angel out of him. I now keep his follies, his eccentricities that I can’t find elsewhere and his gaze, there is an absolute tenderness and a wound“.
Her love story with Serge Gainsbourg
“With Serge Gainsbourg, it was not love at first sight. Perhaps this is why it lasted longer because I was discovering it little by little. It terrified me at first. He had a sly look so when we met on a shoot, I found him so distant. Then he had dinner at Régine’s, I believe. There was a dance floor, I pulled Serge onto the floor, and he was stepping on my feet. I said to myself: ‘Oh happiness! That means he actually can’t dance. He is clumsy’. All this arrogance is a way to hide the shy person who is behind, terribly candid. It was a man’s delight“.
Jane Birkin’s last interview with Elodie Suigo
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