With unlaced tennis shoes, a white T-shirt and blue jeans, Jane Birkin had a naturally chic style of her own invention. English, but rooted in France thanks to the songwriter Serge Gainsbourg, she was surprised to have been so fascinated by « the French, whom I found so beautiful, and by Serge’s universe, his Jewish religion, so attractive, » to the detriment of her country of origin. The first consequence was that Birkin will forever be credited with the creation of a particular « creole, » what her writer friend Olivier Rolin called an « unhinged » French.
One day, in 2008, because she was a musical artist, she had even determined to exorcise her linguistic demons by writing from start to finish the lyrics for Enfants d’hiver – an exercise she renewed 12 years later, in 2020, with the album Oh! Pardon tu dormais, made with her friend Etienne Daho. « There, I had to be precise, and not make mistakes in French, but I wanted it to remain me. It took me a while to understand ‘l’on s’éreinte’ [to wear oneself out]. I thought it meant throwing your arms around your neck, » she said then, laughing. And when she smiled, her eyes crinkled. That was Jane Birkin.
Birkin died on Sunday, July 16, in Paris, Le Monde has learned. Born on December 14, 1946, in London, Jane Birkin was the daughter of David Birkin, a commander in the Royal Navy, and the actress Judy Campbell, who was the muse of Noël Coward, the famous British playwright. When speaking French, she sometimes gave words the wrong, spelling or destination, but she was never silenced. She supported her causes and heroines, flying to the aid of the offended: Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1991, before she fell from grace for collaborating with the Burmese junta; Christiane Taubira, the French justice minister from 2012 to 2016, whom opponents of same-sex marriage wanted to « send back to Africa » to « eat bananas. »
Pop icon
Everything about Birkin was activism. First of all, there was the look, from the ultra-transparent dress worn to the premiere of the 1969 film Slogan to the Saint Laurent pantsuit worn at the « Gainsbourg Symphonique« concerts in 2017. Over time, Birkin added comfortable sweatshirts to the low-cut tank tops and the lattice jackets that fell just right; she put her hair in a bun and wore half-moon-shaped glasses. But she never aged; she was always learning about life, a creature of the night, her nerves on edge. In 2008, Birkin was already a grandmother wearing knitted sweaters when the shoe brand Converse made her one of its representatives (along with Asia Argento in Italy, Nina Hagen in Germany and the late Ian Curtis in England). Such people, said Converse, were chosen « for their optimistic vision of rebellion. » In 2021, at the age of 75, she was in bed with Etienne Daho for an elegant music video on marital problems, illustrating the song « Oh! Pardon tu dormais, » where she recalled the convulsions of her marriage with the English composer John Barry, when she was 17 and he 13 years older.
In 2004, Mickaël Furnon, singer and composer of the group Mickey 3D, wrote a song, « Je m’appelle Jane, » in the form of a dialogue with the annoying pop icon who had an answer for everything. In it, he asked the questions that formed the basis of Birkin’s almost hypnotic relationship with her artist friends and audience, and ends with a definitive « My name is Jane and you can go to hell. » Part of the dialogue goes:
« Say, Birkin, why didn’t you get fatter as you got older? You’re still as beautiful as you were before. »
« It’s because I’m clever. »
Clever, surely, fine always, her neckerchief tied with elegance. She was airy and yet profound. Her partner Olivier Rolin, who met her in Sarajevo in 1995, wrote in a luminous preface to the 2004 book of photographs published by Birkin and her childhood friend and « sister » Gabrielle Crawford: « Jane walking on the beach, her linen shirt blowing in the wind, a pencil in her hair, simplicity and bareness. Jane at home in Paris, under the dark printed fabrics, the hangings, the frills, the garlands, the chandeliers, the stuffed animals, the photos, the knick-knacks of memory: an eccentric Englishwoman. »
Birkin’s life, apart from Gainsbourg, was a seamless adventure – records, films, theater, love at first sight and hard knocks. On the album Enfants d’hiver, the cover photo, taken « perhaps by [her] grandmother, » shows Jane at age 12, a wiry child in ballet shoes, looking straight ahead, standing on a beach on the Isle of Wight – she was a boarder there and, as she recounts in Jane B. par Agnès V. (1988), was called by her room number: « Ninety-Nine. »
In the booklet, she included family portraits – her mother, her brother Andrew, her younger sister Linda. « Andrew is beautiful, he has the head of the theater director he will be; I have the head of an actress; and Linda, who already doesn’t want to be involved in any of this! » In 2004, her mother was slowly slipping to her death in a British hospital, which, thanks to neo-liberalism, used « cash nurses, » independent nurses paid by the hour. Birkin was outraged. Her father had died a few days after Gainsbourg, in 1991.
In the apartment where she lived, near Rue de Verneuil, in Paris, where Gainsbourg had lived, and then in her house near the Jardin des Plantes, she pinned collages and preserved photographic works, including a beautifully blurred black and white print of her brother Andrew, whose son, Anno Birkin, was killed at the age of 20 in a car accident in 2001. In her home, there were red drapes, moiré fabrics, sofas, a profusion of green plants and patio lights, objects, drawings: a cultivated shambles, chic and sincere. There were copper pans and large stoves, because Birkin loved family, her three daughters – Kate Barry, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Lou Doillon. That was Birkin.
Women to follow
Her sister Linda, a sculptor, was so discreet that she refused to show her works. « She keeps them for herself, for example this concrete picnic, everything is in concrete, the Coke bottles, the glasses, everything in concrete, it’s great! All the details! » Birkin said in 2013, when she presented, with Crawford, the collection of photographs that the latter had devoted to her. The book was dedicated to Kate Barry, her daughter with John Barry. Kate, a photographer, had fallen from a window on December 11, 2013, « the same day this book was going to print, » the flyleaf explained.
Birkin and Gabrielle Lewis (Gabrielle Crawford’s maiden name) were featured together, without knowing each other, in the Daily Mail for a photo of the « class of ’64 »: about 50 women to keep an eye on, among them Nico and Marianne Faithfull. « Six months after the photo in the Daily Mail, I auditioned for the musical Passion Flower Hotel, put to music by John Barry, and so did Gabrielle, » said Birkin. Dismissed, Lewis then became a DJ at the Pickwick Club, in the West End of London, a venue where Swinging London was being created. In the era of the miniskirt, the two girls became attached after meeting through their husbands: Barry for Birkin, and the actor and singer Michael Crawford for Lewis. The two men and Birkin appear in the credits of Passion Flower Hotel and Richard Lester’s film The Knack … and How to Get It, winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1965.
There is another photograph, taken on the day of the baptism of one of Gabrielle Crawford’s daughters, Lucy: « I was the godmother. Kate was screaming, she had thrown up on me, John Barry was not speaking to me anymore, so it was a cozy little English affair… » Barry was composing the soundtracks of James Bond films (and later others, such as Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves); Birkin was filming for Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up, winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1967. She was 19 years old. Jeanloup Sieff photographed her for Harper’s Bazaar. She was magnificent.
‘Dirty song’
In 1967, Gainsbourg crossed the Channel to record « Comic Strip, » a song inspired by Jean-Claude Forest’s comic book Barbarella, with an English chorus girl. He undertook a British saga that found its apotheosis in 1971 with the album Histoire de Melody Nelson. In the middle of May 1968, he found Birkin on the set of Pierre Grimblat’s Slogan. She brought him, she said, « the feminine. » As a girl with flat breasts and an androgynous figure, she offered Gainsbourg, who thought himself ugly, the opportunity to make himself beautiful by wearing long hair, Repetto loafers and « marquise jewelry. »
A year later, England was scandalized, as were France and the Vatican, by « Je t’aime… moi non plus, » a breathy melody, an unequaled love duet, initially recorded by Brigitte Bardot, with whom Gainsbourg had earlier fallen in love. « I must have hurt the English, my parents too, » said Birkin, an expert in feverish sentimentality. The song made her famous all over the world, and it stuck to her, especially in the UK, where the most serious journalists (those of the BBC) could not, she said, stop asking her « annoying » questions: « When are you going to do another dirty song? I know that, when I leave with my feet first, they will play ‘Je t’aime… moi non plus.' »
Birkin sang, Birkin lived; she was also an actress and loved movies. In 1969, she starred in Jacques Deray’s La Piscine, a tightly shot film with Romy Schneider, Alain Delon and Maurice Ronet. And she would become a popular star in France, playing a « lovely idiot » alongside Pierre Richard in La moutarde me monte au nez (1974). In the meantime, in 1971, after the birth of Charlotte, she took a break in her career. In 1973, she was the fascinated and wiry lover of Bardot in the flesh in Roger Vadim’s Don Juan, ou si Don Juan était une femme. In 1975, she played one of the main roles in Serge Gainsbourg’s first film as a director, Je t’aime moi non plus – featuring sexual ambiguity and violent sodomy.
With Gainsbourg, she haunted the Palace, the Mecca of Parisian nightlife in the 1980s. She loved Gainsbourg « because he could listen to Grieg in the afternoon and talk with Patrick Sébastien at 8:30 pm. » She saw in him a shy Little Prince, a detached dandy, a musical character out of Sondheim or Gershwin, the originators of a kind of blues she loved. Then came the « Gainsbarre » era, a crazy one, and it was not hers. He drank, he became delirious, he was destroyed, she was not. She left him in 1980 to live with the director Jacques Doillon, with whom she had a child, Lou, born in 1982, before shooting The Pirate with him in 1984. In the meantime, Gainsbourg, who composed Isabelle Adjani’s « Pull Marine, » offered her an album, Baby Alone in Babylone – « Flee from happiness lest it run away. »
The Gainsbourg legacy
A little soldier of memory, Jane Birkin had a sense of the sacred. She had always been, artistically, the « sole heir » of Gainsbourg, who died on March 2, 1991. Jane Birkin recorded seven albums « made in Serge Gainsbourg, » songs written for her or covers of his repertoire, from Jane Birkin & Serge Gainsbourg (1969) to the ultimate and unforgettable Amours des feintes (1990). She went from the cheerful Lolita of La Gadoue to the melancholic Jane B, through the amiable Di Doo Dah, « Ex-fan des sixties, » and the thicker character of Dessous chics. Gainsbourg always had a certain « disillusioned » concern toward her, she said. In 1987, she even gave a solo recital at the Bataclan. « Serge was there, with his lighter, and Bambou [his new wife]. I was learning that we could enjoy ourselves. »
Widow of the ambiguous war that Gainsbourg waged with himself, with women and with society, Birkin did not consider artistic infidelity for a long time. If composers solicited her for her wispy voice (like a wisp of hair or smoke), she refused them. In 1994, after a French tour, she swore that she would stop singing. But then who would sing Gainsbourg? Only Zizi Jeanmaire, for whom he had written songs, and who had just ventured to do so at the Zenith in Paris. Birkin was a legalist. When she thought of engaging « in Serge » once again, she wanted to cover « her » songs, those of Baby Alone in Babylone, Lost Song or Amours des feintes, with a symphony orchestra. But Philippe Lerichomme, Jane and Serge’s artistic director since the 1970s, warned her of the danger of repeating herself or scraping the bottom of the barrel.
It was six years before she dared to do so. In 1996, she published Versions Jane, 15 covers of songs that Gainsbourg had written for others, orchestrated by musicians as different as Les Négresses Vertes, Jean-Claude Vannier, Eddy Louiss, Doudou N’diaye Rose, Catherine Michel and Joachim Kühn. She gained ground on other women: Catherine Deneuve, from whom she stole « Dépression au-dessus d’un jardin »; Françoise Hardy, dispossessed of « Comment te dire adieu, » with the complicity of a brass band led by Goran Bregovic; Adjani, gently frustrated by « Le Mal intérieur. »
And since it was not said that she would be a war widow all her life, in 1999 she betrayed him head on with the album A la légère, written by Miossec, Françoise Hardy, Alain Souchon and MC Solaar. In the same vein, she followed with Rendez-vous (duets, in 2004), Fictions (2006, with Beth Gibbons, the singer of Portishead, Neil Hannon of Divine Comedy, etc.), Enfants d’hiver (2008) and Oh! Pardon tu d’ormais (2020), for both of which she wrote the lyrics.
A ‘credible’ actress
She was feeling a bit down, surely. She had some regrets, including that of having become an actress tardively, « in 1984, » she said: in La Pirate, the film by Jacques Doillon, then in La Fausse Suivante, directed in 1985 by Patrice Chéreau. She revealed herself as a « credible » actress, she said, in Doillon’s La Fille prodigue in 1981. « It was the first time that someone making so-called ‘intellectual’ films thought of me. Doillon was a film director who was not interested in seeing me without my clothes on. He told me, ‘I want you buttoned up to the neck, I want to know what’s going on in your head and I want you to have a nervous breakdown.' » She then filmed with Jacques Rivette, James Ivory, Alain Resnais and Jean-Luc Godard. Varda devoted a feature film to her, Jane B. par Agnès V. Jane Birkin made her first feature film as a director in 2007, Boxes, which brought together Geraldine Chaplin, Natacha Régnier and her daughter Lou Doillon.
With her mixture of seductiveness and intelligence, her ease in showing her feelings under a modest exterior, she occupied a special place in the cartography of French stars. As a singer, she benefited from a sympathetic endowment that the cinema, but also the theater, caused to thrive.
In 1994, Birkin left for London. The pretext was to honor the memory of Gainsbourg at the Savoy Theatre for one night. The Tribute to Serge was a success, reviving Serge Gainsbourg’s image, which was very blurred at the time, across the Channel. Above all, it brought Birkin back to her roots. Attending the Tribute to Serge, an artists’ agent offered her the role of Andromache in Euripides’ The Women of Troy, directed by Annie Castledine at the National Theatre.
Birkin was a « woman of maddening beauty, » wrote the critic Richard Williams in The Independent a few months later: The article was entitled « Return of the Native. » « She has kept her beauty (…), » he added; « no one may recognize her in the streets of London, as she has often noticed after so many years of exile. But in any case, she cannot be ignored. » In 1999, she acted in Oh! Pardon tu dormais, directed by Xavier Durringer, on a text that she had written in 1992 – whose title she took up for her album co-written with Etienne Daho in 2020. In 2005 and 2006, she also performed Sophocles and Shakespeare in France and Great Britain.
Birkin, the fighter
Birkin often dressed and undressed the works of Serge, « a major poet, » whom she has performed since 1969. Separation, death and collaboration with others have done nothing: Birkin has continued to wear the songs of her companion in art and life, whether they were created when they lived together or when the strength of their bond endured beyond the conflicts between them. « It’s a privilege that one of the greatest French songwriters wrote for me from the time I was 20 until I was 45. That’s it, it’s never stopped. It’s a strange situation. What can I do for him now, when everything is too late? At least I can carry him, take him away. Say his words! » she explained in 2017, as she prepared the release of Gainsbourg symphonique.
In 1999, she staged Arabesque: She put Gainsbourg’s songs through the oriental mill with the complicity of the Algerian violinist Djamel Benyelles, leader of the group Djam & Fam. The show toured the world, with more than 200 dates in 30 countries, before the release of an album in 2002. Jane Birkin turned it into a manifesto for the crossing of cultures and spread the idea of a happily cosmopolitan Gainsbourg. It was Birkin the fighter.
Her website long displayed her preferences, first of all that of struggle, with a dedicated tab titled « My commitments »: saving Aung San Suu Kyi, or Chechnya. She also went to Sarajevo in 1994 to offer books as a sign of protest against the « ethnic cleansing carried out by the ultranationalist Serbs. » There she found « pride, the same hauteur that Jacqueline, Serge’s sister, used to tell me about: In the midst of Nazi persecution, the Ginzburg parents demanded that she go to her piano lessons, even if it meant walking 10 kilometers. »
In 2002, she presented her Arabesque in Moscow. « It was very important, because Serge was from a Russian family. It was before the assassination of the journalist Anna Politkovskaya in 2006. I dedicated this show to the Chechens, but it was very delicate, because the mothers of Russian soldiers who had fought against the Chechens had come to see me in my hotel room to tell me about the war, the hazing, etc. » In Sarajevo, it was easy to choose sides, she concluded, « not in Moscow. » And when she was no longer smiling, Jane Birkin’s eyes were wide open with amazement and emotion.
Ten years later, she conceived Via Japan, with Japanese musicians, then Birkin/Gainsbourg: Le symphonique, 24 songs arranged by pianist, composer and conductor Nobuyuki Nakajima. The adventure began in Japan in 2011, sometime after the disaster of the tsunami and the Fukushima nuclear plant. Japan had welcomed Serge and Jane, then Jane solo, with a passionate love for French song. Jane Birkin traveled to give two support concerts in this battered country « that lives on a fault line and knows it. The Japanese people live with this strangeness, courageously, they have cultivated the beauty of the ephemeral, very pretty dishes that disappear when you eat them, floral arrangements. »
In 2014, weakened by leukemia, she continued a tour entitled Gainsbourg, poète majeur, where she read the writer’s texts, along with her friends Michel Piccoli and Hervé Pierre, the latter an actor with the Comédie-Française. Exhausted, carried on stage by a man she trusted, she had never disarmed herself; she was always within herself, and finally unfathomable. It was an exploratory and intimate work that Jane Birkin continued in 2020, tracing with her fragile tone the violence of the decline of love, also exorcising the drama of her daughter’s death (« Cigarettes, » « Ces murs épais ») and her serious health problems (« Telle est ma maladie envers toi »).
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