Unlaced sneakers, white T-shirt and blue jeans, Jane Birkin lived in a natural chic, invented by her. English, rooted in France by the grace of a songwriter of Russian origin, 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 his country of origin. First consequence: forever, we will owe to Jane Birkin the invention of a particular “Creole”, what her writer friend Olivier Rolin called a French “which goes out of its hinges”.
One day, in 2008, and because she was a musical artist, she had even decided to exorcise her linguistic demons by writing from A to Z Winter Children (or miscellaneous) – exercise renewed twelve years later, in 2020, with the album Oh! Pardon tu slept, made with his friend Etienne Daho. “There, I had to be precise, that I wasn’t wrong in French, but I wanted to stay me. It took me a while to understand “we are exhausted”. I thought that meant throwing his arms around his neck. So, for example, I say, “By the grace of you.” Gainsbourg had indeed written “the love of me” ”, she said then, laughing. And when she smiled, her eyes narrowed, it was Birkin.
Jane Birkin died on Sunday July 16 in Paris, according to information from Le Monde. Born on December 14, 1946, in London, Jane Birkin is the daughter of David Birkin, commander in the Royal Navy, and actress Judy Campbell, who was the muse of Noël Coward, the famous British playwright. Rock, cement, pebbles, scissors, leaves, cabbage, knees: Birkin’s words sometimes changed gender, spelling, or destination, but she was never gagged. After having supported its causes and its heroines, flying to the aid of the offended, from Aung San Suu Kyi, Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, before she fell into disgrace due to collaboration with the Burmese junta, to Christiane Taubira , former Keeper of the Seals from 2012 to 2016, whom opponents of marriage for all wanted to send back “to eat bananas” in Africa.
pop icon
Everything about Birkin was militant. The look first, from the ultra-transparent dress worn on the evening of the premiere of the film Slogan, in 1969, to the Saint Laurent trouser suit at the “Gainsbourg symphonique” concerts, in 2017. In the city, over time, Birkin had added to the low-cut tank tops comfortable sweatshirts, fatigues jackets that fell exactly, the bun and the half-moon glasses. But she wasn’t getting old, she was constantly learning life, a creature of the night and her nerves raw. In 2008, Jane was already a grandmother and wore knitted sweaters, when the shoe brand Converse made her one of its muses (alongside Asia Argento in Italy, Nina Hagen in Germany, or the late Ian Curtis in England…) . People, Converse said, “chosen for their optimistic view of rebellion.” In 2021, at 75, here she is in bed with Etienne Daho for an elegant clip on marital disappointments, illustrating the song Oh! Pardon tu slept, where she remembers the tears of the couple she formed with the English composer John Barry, she 17 years old, he thirteen years older.
The singer and composer of the group Mickey 3D, Mickaël Furnon, wrote a song in 2004, My name is Jane, in the form of a dialogue with this annoying pop icon who has the answer to everything. In it he posed the questions that founded Birkin’s almost hypnotic relationship with his fellow artists and his audience, which ended with a definitive: “My name is Jane and I’m fucking you. »
“Say, Birkin, why haven’t you put on weight as you got older? You’re still as beautiful as before – I’m smart”
Surely clever, always fine, his neck warmer tied with elegance. It was ethereal and, yet, all in depth. “Jane walking on the beach, linen shirt blowing in the wind, a pencil stuck in her hair, the simplicity, the austerity. Jane at home in Paris, under the dark printed fabrics, the hangings, the frills, the garlands, the chandeliers, the stuffed critters, the photos, the trinkets of memory: an eccentric Englishwoman,” writes Olivier Rolin, whom he met in Sarajevo in 1995 and who was his companion, in a luminous preface to the book of photographs published by Jane Birkin and Gabrielle Crawford, his childhood friend, his “sister”, at Flammarion (2004).
Jane’s life, outside “Serge”, is an unbroken adventure – records, films, theatre, love at first sight and hard times. On the Winter Children album, the cover photo, taken “perhaps by [her] grandmother”, shows Jane at 12, a skinny child, boyish in ballet flats, looking straight, planted on a beach of the Isle of Wight – she was a boarder there and, as she recounts in Jane B. by Agnes V. (1988), was called by her room number: “Ninety-Nine” (99).
In the booklet, she had placed family portraits – her mother, her brother Andrew, her younger sister Linda. “Andrew is beautiful, he looks like the director he will be, me like the actress, and Linda, who already doesn’t want to get involved in any of this!” In 2004, his mother was slowly sliding towards death in a British hospital, which, liberalism obliges, used cash nurses, independent nurses paid by the hour. And Birkin was indignant. His father died a few days after Serge Gainsbourg, in 1991.
In the apartment she occupied, near rue de Verneuil, where Serge Gainsbourg lived, then in her house near the Jardin des Plantes, she had pinned jumbles, kept photographic works, a beautifully vagueness of his brother Andrew, whose son, Anno Birkin, was killed in 2001, at the age of 20, in a car accident. In her house, there were red hangings, moire fabrics, sofas, a profusion of green plants and small lights on the terrace, objects, drawings, a cultured, chic, sincere shambles. Copper saucepans, large stoves, because Birkin loved family, his three daughters – Kate (Barry), Charlotte (Gainsbourg), Lou (Doillon). It was Birkin.
Women to follow
Linda, the sister, a sculptor, is so discreet that she refused to show her works. “She keeps it to herself, like that concrete picnic, everything is concrete, the Coke bottles, the glasses, everything concrete, it’s great!” All the details ! “, was surprised Jane Birkin, in 2013, when she presented with Gabrielle Crawford, the collection of photographs that the latter had dedicated to him. The book was dedicated to Kate Barry, daughter of Jane and John Barry. Kate, a photographer, walked out of a window on December 11, 2013, “the same day this book went to print,” the cover page explained.
Jane Birkin and Gabrielle Lewis (maiden name of Gabrielle Crawford) appeared together, without knowing each other, in the Daily Mail for a photo of the “class of 64”: about fifty women “to follow”, including Nico and Marianne Faithfull … “Six months after the Daily Mail picture, I auditioned for the musical Passion Flower Hotel, set to music by John Barry, Gabrielle too,” Jane said. Discarded, Gabrielle then became a DJ at the Pickwick Club, in London, in the West End, a club where Swinging London was being invented. At the time of the miniskirt, the “attachment” of the two girls is tied thanks to their husbands: the composer John Barry for Jane Birkin, the actor and singer Michael Crawford for Gabrielle Lewis. The two men and Jane appear in the credits of Passion Flower Hotel and the film The Knack… and how to get it, by Richard Lester, Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1965.
There is another photograph, taken on the day of the baptism of one of Gabrielle’s daughters, Lucy: “I was the godmother. Kate was screaming, she had vomited on me, John Barry wasn’t talking to me anymore, that’s a really cozy little English affair…” John Barry composed the soundtracks for James Bond films (and later others, such as Dancing with Wolves, by Kevin Costner); she shot Blow Up, by Antonioni, Palme d’or at Cannes in 1967. She was 19, Jeanloup Sieff photographed her for Harper’s Bazaar. She is magnificent.
“Dirty Song”
Still in 1967, Serge Gainsbourg crossed the Channel to record Comic Strip, a song inspired by the comic strip Barbarella, by Jean-Claude Forest, with an English singer. He undertook a British epic which would culminate in 1971 with Histoire de Melody Nelson. Meanwhile, he grabs Jane Birkin, in the middle of May 68, on the set of Slogan, by Pierre Grimblat. She brings him, she says, “the feminine.” Elle, a girl with flat breasts and an androgynous figure, offers a Gainsbourg who thought he was ugly the opportunity to be beautiful by wearing long hair, Repetto moccasins and “marquise jewelry”.
A year later, England was scandalized, like France and the Vatican, by Je t’aime… moi non plus, a sighing melody, an unequaled love duet, initially recorded by Brigitte Bardot, with whom Gainsbourg had previously fallen in love. “I must have upset the English, my parents too,” explained Jane, an expert in feverish sentimentality. The song made her famous all over the world, and constantly stuck with her, especially across the Channel, where the most serious journalists (those of the BBC) could not, she said, help him ask “nervous” questions: “When are you going to do another dirty song again? I know that when I leave feet first, they will play I love you…me neither. »
Birkin sang, Birkin lived, she was also an actress and loved cinema. In 1969, she appeared in La Piscine, by Jacques Deray, behind closed doors with Romy Schneider, Alain Delon and Maurice Ronet. And will become a popular star in France, playing in particular a “lovely idiot” alongside Pierre Richard in Mustard goes to my nose (1974). In the meantime, she took a break from her career in 1971, after the birth of Charlotte. In 1973, she was the fascinated and wiry lover of a fleshy Brigitte Bardot in Don Juan or if Don Juan was a woman, by Roger Vadim. In 1975, she held one of the main roles in Serge’s first film as a director, Je t’aime moi non plus – sexual ambiguity and violent sodomy on the program.
With Serge, she haunts the Palace, a Mecca for Parisian nightlife in the 1980s. She likes Gainsbourg “because he could listen to Grieg in the afternoon and talk to Patrick Sébastien at 8:30 p.m.”. She sees in him a frightened Little Prince, a detached dandy, a Sondheim or Gershwin musical character, initiators of a bluish cockroach that she adores. Then comes the ramshackle “Gainsbarre” era, and it’s not his. He drinks, he is delirious, he is destroyed, she is not. She left him in 1980 to live with the director Jacques Doillon, with whom she had a child, Lou, born in 1982, before filming La Pirate with him in 1984. In the meantime, Gainsbourg, who was preparing the Pull Marine d’Adjani, offers him an album, Baby Alone in Babylon – “Fleeing happiness lest it run away”…
The Gainsbourg legacy
A little soldier of memory, Jane Birkin has a sense of the sacred. She has always been, artistically, the “universal legatee” of Serge 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
Widow of the ambiguous war that Gainsbourg waged on himself, on women or on society, Jane Birkin did not consider artistic infidelity for a long time. If composers approach her, for her wispy voice (from wisp, “strand of hair”, “wisp of smoke”), she refuses. In 1994, after a French tour, she swore she was going to stop singing. But then who would sing Gainsbourg? Only Zizi Jeanmaire, for whom he had written songs, has just risked it at the Zénith, in Paris. Birkin is a legalist. When she thinks of engaging “in Serge” once again, she wants to resume “his” songs, those of Baby Alone in Babylon, Lost Song or Amours des feintes, with symphony orchestra. But Philippe Lerichomme, the artistic director of Jane and Serge since the 1970s, warns him of the danger of repeating himself or scraping the bottoms of drawers.
It takes six years before she dares. In 1996, she published Versions Jane, fifteen covers of songs that Serge Gainsbourg had written for others than herself, orchestrated by musicians as different as Les Négresses vertes, Jean-Claude Vannier, Eddy Louiss, Doudou N’diaye Rose. , Catherine Michel or Joachim Kühn. She gains ground on the other women: Catherine Deneuve, from whom she pilfers Depression above a garden; Françoise Hardy, dispossessed of Comment te dire adieu, with the complicity of a brass band led by Goran Bregovic; Isabelle Adjani, gently frustrated with inner Evil.
And since it was not said that she would be a war widow all her life, she betrayed head-on, in 1999, with the album A la lumière, written by Miossec, Françoise Hardy, Alain Souchon, MC Solaar… same vein, it will then be Rendez-vous (duets, in 2004), Fictions (2006, with Beth Gibbons, the voice of Portishead, Neil Hannon of Divine Comedy, etc.), Winter Children (2008), Oh! Pardon tu slept… (2020), which she writes.
“Believable” actress
She had some vagueness in her soul, surely. A few regrets. That of having been a late actress, “in 1984”, she says, in La Pirate, the film by Jacques Doillon, then in La Fausse Following, directed in 1985 by Patrice Chéreau. Revealed as a “credible” actress, she said, in La Fille prodigue, by Doillon, in 1981. “It was the first time that someone making so-called ‘intellectual’ films thought of me. Jacques Doillon was a film director who was not interested in seeing me without my clothes. He said, “I want you buttoned up, I want to know what’s going on in your head, and I want you to have a hysterical fit.” She then toured with Jacques Rivette, James Ivory, Alain Resnais and Jean-Luc Godard. Agnès Varda devotes a feature film to her, Jane B. by Agnès V. Birkin shot her first feature film as a director in 2007, Boxes, which brings together Geraldine Chaplin, Natacha Régnier and her daughter Lou Doillon.
With her mix of seduction and intelligence, her ability to display her feelings under a modest exterior, she occupied a special place in the cartography of French stars. Singer, she benefited from a sympathy capital that the cinema, but also the theater made fruitful.
In 1994, Jane left for London. The pretext: to honor the memory of Serge Gainsbourg, for one evening, at the Savoy Theatre. Led successfully, this Tribute to Serge renovates the image, at the time very vague, of Gainsbourg across the Channel. Above all, it brings Jane B. back to her roots. Present at the Tribute to Serge, an artistic agent then offered him the role of Andromaque in The Women of Troy (Les Troyennes, by Euripides), directed by Annie Castledine at the National Theatre.
Birkin was “a woman of playful beauty”, critic Richard Williams wrote in The Independent a few months later: the article was titled “Return of the Native”. “She has kept her beauty (…), he adds, no one will perhaps recognize her in the streets of London, as she has often noticed after so many years of exile. But in no case can it go unnoticed. In 1999, she performed Oh! Pardon tu dormais, directed by Xavier Durringer, to a text she wrote in 1992 – the title of which she took up for her album co-written with Etienne Daho in 2020. In 2005 and 2006, she also played Sophocles and Shakespeare in France and in Great Britain.
Birkin, the fighter
Jane Birkin has often dressed, undressed the works of Serge, “major poet”, whom she has been performing since 1969. Separation, death, collaboration with others have done nothing: Jane continued to carry the songs of his companion in life and art, whether they were created when they lived together or when the strength of their bond endured beyond conflict. “It is a privilege that one of the greatest French authors wrote for me from my 20s until my 45s. Well, it never stopped. It is a strange situation. What can I do for him now, when it’s all too late? At least I can carry it, take it. Speak his words! “, she explained in 2017, while she was preparing the release of a Gainsbourg symphony.
In 1999, she had created Arabesque on stage: there she passed the songs of Gainsbourg with the oriental grinder with the complicity of the Algerian violinist Djamel Benyelles, leader of the group Djam
His website has long displayed his preferences, that of the struggle first, with a dedicated tab, entitled “My commitments”: saving Aung San Suu Kyi, or Chechnya. She also went to Sarajevo in 1994 to donate books in protest against the “ethnic cleansing by ultranationalist Serbs”. She found there “the pride, the height, the same as that of which Jacqueline, Serge’s sister, spoke to me: in the midst of Nazi persecution, the Ginzburg parents demanded that she go and take her piano lessons, even if it meant walking 10 kilometers foot “.
In 2002, she gave Arabesque in Moscow. “It was very important, because Serge was from a Russian family. It was before the assassination of the journalist Anna Politkovskaïa, in 2006. I dedicated this show to the Chechens, but it was very delicate, because the mothers of Russian soldiers who had fought 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 no longer smiled, Jane Birkin had her amazed and moved eyes, wide open.
Ten years later, she conceived Via Japan, with Japanese musicians, then Birkin/Gainsbourg, the symphonic, twenty-four songs arranged by the pianist, composer and conductor Nobuyuki Nakajima. An adventure that begins in Japan in 2011, some time after the disaster of the tsunami and the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Japan had welcomed Serge and Jane, then Jane solo, with a passionate love of French song. Jane is going to give two support concerts in this bruised country, “which 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, which disappear when you eat them, compositions of flowers”.
In 2014, weakened by leukemia, she continued a tour entitled Gainsbourg, major poet, where she read the texts of Serge, in the company of her friends Michel Piccoli and Hervé Pierre, actor of the Comédie-Française. Exhausted, carried on stage by a man of confidence, she had never disarmed, always as in herself, and finally unfathomable. An exploratory and intimate work that Jane B. had continued in 2020, tracing with her fragile timbre the violence of the decline in love, also exorcising the drama of the death of her daughter (Cigarettes, These thick walls) and her serious health problems (Telle is my disease towards you).
The Oh! Sorry, you were sleeping… was prevented by the confinements and restrictions due to the Covid-19 epidemic. The show was finally created in May 2021 with Etienne Daho, after a residency at the Scènes du Golfe de Vannes. Jane Birkin returned to the road as an author, not forgetting her role as an interpreter by resuming, here and there, the show Birkin / Gainsbourg le symphonique.
Always courageous, present forever despite numerous cancellations of concerts due to zigzag health – microbial attack, stroke… Jane, whole, unvarnished, did not disguise her bloated face during the Césars du cinema ceremony in February 2023 She was happy there, as an unwavering mother, who had come to support her daughter Charlotte, director of the documentary Jane by Charlotte, a modest cross-portrait, sketched by dint of little nothings that make the salt of life and the foundations of love.
