jane berkin
François Guillot | AFP | Getty Images
British-born actress and singer Jane Birkin has died in Paris aged 76. She was a wild child of the 1960s who went on to become popular in France.
France’s culture ministry said the country had lost “an eternal icon of the French language”.
She was found dead at home, local media quoted people close to her as saying. Birkin suffered a minor stroke in 2021 after suffering a heart attack in previous years.
Birkin became known overseas for her 1969 hit, in which she and her then-lover, the late French singer-songwriter Serge Gainsbourg, sang the sexually explicit song “Je t’aime…moi non plus”.
She has been living in her native France since the late 1960s, and in addition to singing and acting in dozens of films, she is known for her passionate personality, steadfast fight for women’s and LGBT rights and become popular.
Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo said “the most Parisian Briton has left us”. “We’ll never forget her singing, her laugh and her incomparable accent that was always with us.”
Jane Mallory Birkin was born in London in December 1946, the daughter of British actress Judy Campbell and Royal Navy Admiral David Birkin.
She made her stage debut at age 17 and went on to appear in conductor-composer John Barry’s 1965 musical “Passionflower Hotel,” to whom she married shortly thereafter. The marriage ended in the late 1960s.
Before venturing across the English Channel at the age of 22, she gained notoriety for getting naked in a threesome sex scene in Michelangelo Antonioni’s controversial 1966 film Zoom.
But it was in France that she really became famous, not only for her romance with tortured national star Gainsbourg, but also for her tomboy style and French-speaking endearing British accent, which some say she cultivated .
After the relationship broke down in 1981, she continued her career as a singer and actress, hitting the stage and releasing albums such as Baby Alone in Babylone in 1983 and Amour des Feintes in 1990, both with lyrics and music by Gainsbourg.
She wrote her own album Arabesque in 2002 and released the live recording collection Jane at the Palace in 2009.
“Living in a world without you is unimaginable,” said French singer Etienne Daho, producer and composer of Birkin’s final 2020 album.
Birkin first met Gainsbourg, then recovering from her breakup with Brigitte Bardot, on the set of the film Slogan in 1969, and the two soon began a sensational, national romance.
That same year they released “Je T’Aime…Moi Non Plus” (“I Love You…Neither”), a song about physical love originally written for Bardot, Gans Gasping moans and Birkin-bag cries are interspersed with explicit lyrics.
The song was banned by the BBC and condemned by the Vatican.
Gainsbourg’s drinking eventually affected their relationship, and Birkin left him in 1981 to live with film director Jacques Doillon. However, she remained close to the troubled singer until his death in March 1991.
Around this time, Jean-Louis Dumas, chief executive of the French luxury brand Hermes, saw her struggling with her straw bag on a flight to London, spilling its contents on the floor, and offered a She designed the famous Birkin bag.
She is survived by two daughters: singer and actress Charlotte, born in 1971, and Lou Doillon, also an actress, born in 1982. She also had a daughter, Kate, who was born in 1967 and died in 2013.