Remembering Jane Birkin - the most timeless of Parisiennes

Jane Birkin and her daughter Charlotte Gainsbourg in documentary Jane By Charlotte Photo: UniFrance

The singer, actress and film director Jane Birkin who was born in England, but lived in France for most of her adult life, has died in her adopted home Paris, aged 76.

French media reported today that she had been discovered by a carer at her Left Bank home in Paris.

Jane with Serge Gainsbourg Photo: UniFrance

She was catapulted to prominence after she created a succès de scandale in 1969 with the song Je t’aime…moi non plus which she made with Serge Gainsbourg, with whom she had daughter Charlotte and a relationship lasting 13 years. Over the years she recorded more than a dozen albums, and appeared in over 70 films, including the Gainsbourg-directed Je t'Aime Mois Non Plus.

She arrived in Paris just after the riots of May 1968 and never left. She was known as a “marcher” and actively supported various causes including anti-capital punishment, pro-choice on abortion rights and was close to her Burmese friend and fellow renegade Aung San Suu Kyi for whom she also organised protests.

Her father David, was a naval commander in special operations, and won the Legion d’Honneur for saving British airmen from the Normandy Coast during the Second World War.

He married her mother the actress Judy Campbell (a leading lady for Noel Coward) after he returned from the War. Jane was the middle daughter of three children - with an elder brother Andrew and younger sister Linda.

When she was 17 she married James Bond theme composer John Barry in 1965 with whom she had her first daughter Kate, who tragically died in 2013 after falling from her fourth-floor flat in Paris. Shortly before she divorced Barry in 1968 Birkin appeared in Antonioni’s seminal Sixties film Blow Up and gained notoriety for a full frontal nude scene.

She then headed for Paris where she met Gainsbourg on the set of the film Slogan when he was 40 and she was 22. Apparently she replaced Brigitte Bardot in his affections.

She told me once: “I was very boring. I got married. I had a baby at 19, I went to France, fell in love with the main actor, Serge - very conventional. We stayed together for 13 years, then I walked out - that's conventional too.”

Birkin attracted interest from the fashion world too and in 1981, Birkin was reportedly sat next to Hermès chief executive Jean-Louis Dumas on a flight. Following a conversation between the pair about how difficult it was to find a bag that could fulfil Birkin's needs as a mother of two, the Birkin bag was born.

It was in 1991 when she was on her way to Gainsbourg’s funeral in Paris she learned that her father had died in England.

Birkin had parted from Gainsbourg who was 62 at the time he died, and she married film director Jacques Doillon with whom she had another daughter Lou, half-sister to Charlotte. She remained close to Serge over the years.

She tried to tell her side of the story in the film Boxes which she wrote and directed and was based around her relationships with three partners and three daughters (the girls all appeared in the film). Other notable films in her career included The Last September, Love On The Ground, La Piscine and Thelma Louise And Chantal.

Jane Birkin Photo: UniFrance

Two years ago Charlotte made a documentary-drama about their relationship Jane By Charlotte which turned out to be a tender and illuminating portrait of a mother-daughter relationship both in private and public. Agnès Varda already attempted to pin her down in Jane B. par Agnès V.

Charlotte had told her mother that she wanted “to look at you as I’ve never looked at you before”.

Once during an interview I had at a film festival in Dinard devoted to British cinema, she recalled a perfect childhood: “It seemed to revolve around Chelsea, my father’s farm in Berkshire, and holidays in Scotland. When I was a teenager my father took us to Skye where I wrote lots of poetry. It was heavenly,” she sighed. Her brother once rented a house on Eigg for a family holiday. “We all brought our various children who were teenagers. We thought they would be too blasé to appreciate the isolation. But they didn't care about not having televisions - they loved being able to get back to nature.”

Recently the icon had not been in the best of health. She suffered a stroke in 2021 and had recently broken her shoulder-blade which led her to cancel several concerts in March.

As the news of her passing spread tributes began to pour in with Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, describing her as "the most Parisian of the English". She added: "We will never forget her songs, her laughter or her incomparable accent that have always accompanied us," she wrote in a tweet. The French Culture Ministry said the country had lost a "timeless French-speaking icon".

Having lived life to the full Birkin frequently claimed that she had no fear of mortality although in one interview she suggested she wanted to avoid settling into old age. She was quoted as saying: “I sometimes fear I am like an undersea creature who spends its whole life searching for the perfect rock and when it finds it, it eats the one thing it does not need any more, its brain. The motto is: never find your rock.”

Read what Jane Birkin told us about Jacques Rivette, Agnès Varda and a special cat.

Jane Birkin. The Paris mayor said she was 'the most Parisian of the English' Photo: UniFrance