OBITUARIES • MUSIC

Jane Birkin, singer and actress, has died

The British-born artist found fame in France, after meeting the singer Serge Gainsbourg. Their
song 'Je t'aime... moi non plus' made her famous worldwide. She died on Sunday in Paris, at the
age of 76.

By Véronique Mortaigne
Published on July 16, 2023, at 1:55 pm (Paris), updated on July 16, 2023, at 4:41 pm
• 13 min.

Jane Birkin at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1984. PIERRE-OLIVIER DESCHAMPS /
AGENCE VU

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 the lyrics for Enfants d'hiver in French, from start to finish – an exercise she
undertook again 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 wronged: 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 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., 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 work. "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 from John Barry. Kate, a photographer, fell to her death 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": 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."

Read more Jane Birkin: 'My first night with Gainsbourg was historic'
Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin, January 21, 1969. AFP

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.'"

Read more "I was this object that wanted to be": Jane Birkin, from 1969 to #metoo

Birkin sang, Birkin lived; she was also an actress and loved movies. In 1969, she starred in Jacques
Deray's La Piscine (The Swimming Pool), 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 sinewy lover of Bardot in
Roger Vadim's Don Juan, ou si Don Juan était une femme (Don Juan, or If Don Juan Were a Woman). In
1975, she played one of the main roles in 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 [Edvard] Grieg in the afternoon and talk with [TV host] 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 La Pirate (The Pirate) with him in 1984. In the meantime, Gainsbourg, who wrote
Isabelle Adjani's song "Pull Marine," offered her an album, Baby Alone in Babylone: "Flee from
happiness lest it run away."

The Gainsbourg legacy

A servant of the past, Birkin had a sense of the sacred. She had always been, artistically, the "sole heir"
of Gainsbourg, who died on March 2, 1991. 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," via the amiable "Di Doo Dah", "Ex-fan des sixties," and the
thicker character of "Les 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."

As the widow from the ambiguous war that Gainsbourg waged with himself, women and society, for a
long time, Birkin did not consider artistic infidelity. If composers solicited her for her wispy voice, 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 the albums Baby Alone in Babylone, Lost Song and Amours
des feintes, with a symphony orchestra. But Philippe Lerichomme, Birkin and Gainsbourg's artistic
director since the 1970s, warned her of the danger of repeating herself or scraping the bottom of the
barrel.

Read more Jane Birkin: 'Serge Gainsbourg was a provocateur with a wildly romantic soul.'

It was six years before she dared to. 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 also
plucked from the repertoires of 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; and Adjani, gently nabbed of "Le Mal intérieur."

Jane Birkin on stage at Carnegie Hall in New York City on February 1, 2018. DON
EMMERT/AFP

And since it was not said that she would be a war widow all her life, in 1999 she betrayed Gainsbourg
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), writing the lyrics herself for the last two.
A 'credible' actress

She was feeling a bit down, possibly. She had some regrets, including that of having become an
actress tardively, "in 1984," she said: in La Pirate, the film by 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. Agnès Varda devoted a feature film to her, Jane B. par Agnès V. 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 the public's sympathy, which also developed from her cinema and theater work.

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 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." In 1999, she acted in Oh! Pardon tu
dormais, directed by Xavier Durringer, based on a text that she had written in 1992 – she later took up
the title for her album co-written with Etienne Daho in 2020. In 2005 and 2006, she also performed
Sophocles and Shakespeare in France and the UK.

Birkin, the fighter

Birkin often dressed and undressed the works of Gainsbourg, whom she called "a major poet," and
whose work she has performed since 1969. Separation, death and collaboration with others changed
nothing: Birkin continued to carry the songs of her partner 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.
Birkin turned it into a manifesto for the mixing of cultures and spread the idea of a happily
cosmopolitan Gainsbourg. It was Birkin the fighter.

Her website has long displayed her preferences, first of all her activism, with a dedicated tab titled
"My commitments": saving Aung San Suu Kyi, saving 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."
Jane Birkin (center) and her daughter Charlotte Gainsbourg march with several
thousand people, on April 27, 2002 in Paris, against the far right, after the Front
National candidate, Jean-Marie Le Pen, qualified for the second round of the 2002
presidential election. DAMIEN MEYER/AFP

In 2002, she presented 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, but "not in Moscow." And
when she was no longer smiling, 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 Gainsbourg and Birkin, then Birkin solo, with a passionate love for
French songs. Birkin traveled to perform two concerts in a 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 his texts, along with friends Michel Piccoli and Hervé Pierre. Exhausted, carried on stage by a
man she trusted, she was never disarmed. She was always within herself, and ungraspable. She
continued her exploratory and intimate work in 2020, tracing with her fragile tone the violence of the
decline of love, and exorcising the drama of her daughter's death ("Cigarettes," "Ces murs épais") and
her serious health problems ("Telle est ma maladie envers toi").

Véronique Mortaigne
Translation of an original article published in French on lemonde.fr; the publisher may only be liable for
the French version.