She was the most French of English singers and the most English of French actresses. With her accent, with which she lasciviously sang “Je t’aime, moi non plus” and played a photo model in the film “Blow up”, Jane Birkin has crept into the hearts of the French. The British-French artist has now died at the age of 76, as a spokesman for the Paris city administration confirmed to the German Press Agency on Sunday.
Her English accent, her gap in teeth and her soft, high-pitched voice – “La Birkin”, as the French liked to call her, was exceptional. She made her breakthrough in 1969 with the song “Je t’aime, moi non plus”. The sung orgasm with Serge Gainsbourg became a scandal. The enfant terrible of the French music scene originally wrote the song for Brigitte Bardot. But B.B. was afraid of the expected scandal.
Sung by Gainsbourg and the early 20-year-old Birkin, the song was then banned in many countries. Birkin, however, made it an overnight star – and she and Gainsbourg a couple. Their daughter, later actress Charlotte Gainsbourg, was born two years later. In September 1980 the relationship broke up – after more than ten years of marriage. Despite the separation, they continued to sing together. Birkin celebrated some of her greatest successes as a singer with Gainsbourg, such as “La danseuse”, another erotic song, and “Melody Nelson”.
The French-by-choice, who was born on December 14, 1946 in London as the daughter of the actress Judy Campbell and left England after a divorce in 1968, has appeared in more than 50 films. This includes the erotic film “Egon Schiele – Exzesse” from 1981. She made her breakthrough as an actress in Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Blow up” (1966). In it she played a photo model, wearing only knee socks. In the tingling erotic thriller “The Swimming Pool” she can be seen alongside Romy Schneider and Alain Delon. Jacques Rivette made her a painter’s model alongside Michel Piccoli in his Cannes jury prize-winning film “The Beautiful Troublemaker”.
Birkin was the sex symbol of the ’60s and ’70s. She couldn’t identify with this image at all, she said decades later. “On the other hand, people liked me, I was never such a dangerous woman as Bardot, I wasn’t perfect and I stayed with my husband. I wasn’t a risk. Bardot was, she took other women’s men,” she said in an interview with “Zeit”.
Birkin was also the namesake for the luxury handbag from Hermès. When asked how many of these so-called Birkin Bags she owns, she answered in an interview with the German Press Agency in December 2022: “I only have one. Who needs more than one handbag?”
After Gainsbourg’s death, Birkin released numerous albums, many featuring his songs but also by other songwriters. Sometimes she also sang her own lyrics. They tell about their childhood, about their life. It was easier for her to sing about herself than to talk.
With “Oh! Pardon tu dormais…” her most personal album was released in 2020. It is about unhealed wounds and death. In recent years, Birkin has also experienced a severe personal blow of fate and had to struggle with health problems. In 2013, Birkin lost her daughter Kate from a relationship with composer John Barry, whom she married in 1965 when she was just 19. After the suicide of her 46-year-old daughter, Birkin withdrew for months. In 2012 she had to cancel many concerts because of an autoimmune disease, a malfunction in which the immune system attacks its own body. In September 2021, she suffered a stroke.
She described her album “Oh! Pardon tu dormais…” as a work full of pain. She quoted a sentence by Gainsbourg: You can’t write anything when the sky is blue, you need clouds and storms.
