Actress, director, singer, Jane Birkin has seduced the French from decade to decade since the end of the 1960s, to the point of becoming their eternal little English girl. She died on Sunday at the age of 76.
Jane Birkin, the British bride of France, passed away on Sunday July 16 at the age of 76, franceinfo learned from press officer Fabien Lecoeuvre, close to the family. Cinema and music have punctuated the professional and romantic life of the artist, who has to his credit some twenty albums and appears in the credits of more than sixty films. Between the language of Shakespeare and that of Voltaire – which she says she learned “with a tape recorder” – songs and films, popular cinema and radical works, Jane Birkin has established herself as an iconoclastic figure in the French cultural landscape.
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Jane Mallory Birkin was born on December 14, 1946 in Marylebone, London. Her mother is none other than actress Judy Campbell and her father, David Birkin, is a Royal Navy Commander. He adored his eldest daughter to the point that young Jane developed feelings of guilt over her younger daughter, Linda. The one we would call a “népokid” today, because born into a family of artists whose tradition she perpetuated, followed in the footsteps of her mother from the age of 17.
She then plays in a play by Graham Greene, then in a musical, Passion Flower Hotel, whose music is composed by John Barry. She secretly marries the composer, father of her eldest daughter Kate Barry and the only one of her companions with whom she is officially married.
The cinema came into her life in 1965. Director Richard Lester allowed the 19-year-old young woman to make her debut on the big screen, alongside Charlotte Rampling and Jacqueline Bisset. She thus appears in a seminal Swinging London film, The Knack…and How to Get It ), which won the Grand Prix (current equivalent of the Palme d’Or) at the Cannes Film Festival. Just like the next movie, blow up (1966) by Michelangelo Antonioni, which caused a scandal at the time because the sublime Jane Birkin appeared naked there.
Music, naturally and out of love
The beautiful little English girl moved to France in 1968, a country whose nationality she would later take. She will soon be playing Slogan (1969). His on-screen partner, Serge Gainsbourg, would become his companion for twelve years. With her pygmalion, she will form one of the most famous couples in France in the 1970s. He will offer the actress with the seductive accent a career as a singer.
The transition to the song sounds like “An evidence” for Jane Birkin. “My mother was famous for a song called A Nightingale Blood in the Berkeley Square (1940) which she sang throughout the Second World War”she confided on the airwaves of franceinfo decades later. “To start with, I had a song to do in a John Barry musical, but it was a comedy song and if I remember correctly, it had nothing to do with my voice or any originality. It was Serge who made me listen to his version of I love you…me neither by Brigitte Bardot. Since I was very in love with him, when he asked me if I wanted to sing it, I jumped at the chance because I didn’t want him to put himself in a booth with any beauty like Mireille Darc or someone else. I had naturally sung an octave higher and it pleased Serge to have the voice of a choir boy.”
He will write her songs like Di Doo Dah to accompany I love you me… either to produce the album Jane Birkin-Serge Gainsbourg, released in 1969. The title Jane B., excerpt from the opus, definitely sticks to his skin. “It’s the one I love the most. More than I love you…me neither because it’s so pure”, she will also confide on franceinfo. In this interview, she also explains that it was not immediately love at first sight for Gainsbourg. “And maybe that’s why it lasted longer, because I was discovering him little by little. At first, he terrified me. He had a sardonic look and when he arrived to do the filming, I I found myself very distant (…). Basically, this arrogance is to hide such a shy, terribly candid person”. And to add : “Serge Gainsbourg, it was such a find, it was a man’s delight”. On Swiss television, in 1988, she stressed that he was for her “man with the cabbage head”, the Gainsbourg record that she loved the most because it contained all the tenderness of being. “It’s the Gainsburg that’s interesting, not the Gainsbarre.”
Muse of Gainsbourg, Doillon and… Hermès
In parallel with the song and his beautiful love story whose fruit is Charlotte Gainsbourg, Birkin connects to the cinema the comedies with success like Mustard up my nose by Claude Zidi who contributed to his popularity in France. In 1975, we also see her in another, more dramatic register, in Seven Prescription Deaths And I love you, me neitherthe disconcerting first film of Gainsbourg from which she will separate a few years later.
In 1980, Birkin now shares the life of filmmaker Jacques Doillon, the father of his third daughter, Lou. He directs her in three major films in her career: The Prodigal Daughter, The Pirate And Comedy!. These films, says Birkin, have “exchange” the look that we had on the actress and opened the doors of auteur cinema and theater to her. The Pirateselected at Cannes in 1984, is “whistled from the opening credits”, says Doillon. “If I break my pipe, said Jane Birkin during a film lesson at the Cinémathèque française in January 2017they pass The Prodigal Daughter And The Pirate please, and even Comedy! for fun, and not even for fun by the way (…) These are films of which I am so proud and which have never been shown”. With Jacques Rivette (Love on the ground, The Beautiful Noiseuse), her friend Agnès Varda (Jane B. by Agnes V. And Kung Fu Master marked by a very family distribution) or Bertrand Tavernier (Daddy Nostalgia), Jane Birkin deploys her immense palette of acting and reveals the intense and versatile actress that she is.
In the 1980s, the singer took her first steps on stage, especially for her first live stage. For Le Bataclan in 1987, Birkin changes his look. She got rid of her long hair so that we no longer pay attention to her figure but only to her voice. With her very short hair, the artist demonstrates, with a certain radicalism, that she is a woman who likes to go straight to the point.
Like the Birkin, a practical bag inspired by her and made by Hermès. The idea for the bag was born in 1984 when Jane Birkin complained of not having “a shopping bag adapted to her needs as a young mother” to his seat neighbor on a Paris-London flight. She does not know then that it is Jean-Louis Dumas, manager of Hermès (1978-2006), who will finally give substance to her wishes.
Under the sign of mourning
For Jane Birkin, the following decade will be heavier and more painful. The 1990s rhyme for her with mourning. She lost the two most important men in her life: Serge Gainsbourg, on March 2, 1991, and on the day of his funeral, March 7, her father. The actress is also rarer in the cinema. But we find it in Black like the memory by Jean-Pierre Mocky and she appears briefly in We know the song by Alain Resnais. In the 2000s, she returned to the burlesque register of her beginnings through comedies queens for a day, Married but not too Or Thelma, Louise and Chantal. In 2009, she reunited with Jacques Rivette who offered her a fine role in 36 views of Pic Saint-Loup. Birkin also became a director and screenwriter, and notably signed the TV movie Oh sorry ! you were Sleeping… And boxes (The boxes2007), feature film with autobiographical accents screened at the Cannes Film Festival.
In 2013, another drama will break the artist known for her legendary optimism and her unalterable confidence in life. On December 11, three days before Jane Birkin’s birthday, her eldest daughter, photographer Kate Barry, fell from the fourth floor of her building. “When Kate died, I stayed at home for a year without moving, without moving at all”, she confided on RTL. The loss of his child, Birkin evokes it with modesty and outspokenness in Oh ! Sorry you were sleeping latest opus, released on December 11, 2020. In particular, it devotes a title to drama, Cigarettes. The whole album is a great intimate disc, of which she wrote all the titles, born thanks to her friend and artistic accomplice Etienne Daho and Jean-Louis Piérot.
Jane Birkin has never deprived herself of the outlet that art can be. The dramas that marked his life also come to the surface in the documentary Jane by Charlotte of her daughter Charlotte Gainsbourg, presented on the Croisette in 2022. Charlotte follows her mother in her daily life and evokes the mutual reserve that marked their relationship. We discover a sincere woman, lucid about herself, her image and her life choices.
“You had more than another the best of me”
“Rereading my diaries, it seems obvious to me that we are not changing. What I am at twelve years old, I am still today (…). I took it as a principle not to fix anything, and believe- I would have preferred to have wiser reactions than the ones I had…”, she wrote in 2018 when her diary was published Munkey Diaries (1957-1982) published by Fayard. In the memory of the French, Jane Birkin will forever remain the Englishwoman who delighted the hearts of her cousins across the Channel. “When I see the French listen to songs that are forty years old, I know they are part of their history. But they are also part of mine.“, she summed up again in 2018.
In 2017, after battling leukemia which broke out in the late 1990s, she told The Express : “I understood, whether I liked it or not, that I only had ten years ahead of me. Well, if I do like mom [disparue à 88 ans], maybe a little more. But there’s not a moment to lose.”
She hasn’t lost a single one, though illness and grief have hampered her in recent years. In Jane by Charlotteshe explains why she loves to sing so much These little things of Gainsbourg. He made him say: “One thing, among other things, that you don’t know, you had the best of me more than anyone else.” A sentence that also applies to all those who loved Jane Birkin a little, a lot, passionately.