In 2009, Jane Birkin, who passed away this past weekend at the age of seventy-six, was in Venice to promote Around a Small Mountain, the fourth film sheâd made with Jacques Rivette. One interviewer, Stuart Mabey, backed his way into a question that just about anyone who met her would want to ask. âI think the word âiconicâ is misused sometimes, and you may not want to hear it,â but there it was, half-wrapped in an apology. âReally, given the very small talent that I had,â Birkin replied with a beaming smile, âmy good fortune has been inestimable.â
Birkinâs modesty here is endearing, but it also belies the arresting presence she brought to films by many of the major directors of the past six decades; to the albums and singles she recorded with Serge Gainsbourg, and later, on her own; and to the overall look of Londonâs fashion scene in the Swinging Sixties. But good fortune did play a supporting role at crucial moments. She was, after all, the daughter of Judy Campbell, the British actress known for her work with NoĂŤl Coward, and David Birkin, a lieutenant commander in the Royal Navy and a spy during the Second World War.
Jane grew up in an affluent West London neighborhood with her older brother, Andrew Birkin (an accomplished screenwriter and director who has worked with Stanley Kubrick and the Beatles, and whose photographs, from his new book, Serge Gainsbourg et Jane Birkin: Lâalbum de famille intime, are currently on view in Nice through October 1), and her younger sister, Linda, a sculptor. By the time she was seventeen, Jane was modeling and auditioning, and in 2008, she told the Guardianâs Laura Barnett about the time she thought sheâd try out for a role in a production of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
âI went to the wrong theater,â Birkin recalled, âand found myself auditioning for a part as a deaf-mute girl in Graham Greeneâs play Carving a Statue. I forgot the words, but a man with extraordinary blue eyes said: âIt doesnât matterâsheâs perfect.â It was Graham Greene.â In 2020, she told the Guardianâs Tim Lewis that Greeneâs eyes âwere so blue, it was like looking straight through to a blue sky through a skull.â
That same year, 1965, Birkin was cast in a musical adaptation of Rosalind Erskineâs novel The Passion Flower Hotel, and she met and immediately fell in love with composer John Barry, who was primarily known at the time for his scores for the James Bond movies. They married and, two years later, had a daughter, Kate Barry, who grew up to become a successful fashion photographer. Kate suffered from severe bouts of depression and addiction, and in 2013, she fell to her death from her fourth-floor apartment in Paris.
Birkinâs career in film began with two small uncredited roles in Richard Lesterâs The Knack . . . and How to Get It (1965) and Daniel Petrieâs The Idol (1966). She had a few more on-screen moments in Jack Smightâs Kaleidoscope (1966), but the breakthrough came with Blow-Up (1966). John Barry dared her to take her clothes off in front of Michelangelo Antonioniâs camera, and the twenty seconds or so of nudity that made the final cut scandalized the British press. After appearing as Penny Lane in Joe Massotâs psychedelic Wonderwall (1968), Birkin left Londonâand Barryâfor Paris.
Though she didnât yet speak French, Birkin had landed a leading role in Pierre Grimblatâs Slogan (1969)âcowritten, by the way, with Melvin Van Peeblesâas the young British lover of a forty-year-old director played by one of Franceâs greatest singer-songwriters, Serge Gainsbourg. Birkin and Gainsbourg soon became one of Europeâs most famous couples, especially after the release of their single âJe tâaime . . . moi non plus,â with its overtly sexual lyrics and hot and heavy breathing. Originally recorded with Brigitte Bardotâthat version didnât get released until 1986âcondemned by the Vatican, and banned in several countries, âJe tâaimeâ was ostensibly sold in the UK only to those over twenty-one, and it still became the first foreign-language tune to hit the top of the charts. The B-side: âJane B.â
âI really came into my own with Serge because he did nothing all day long but think of jolly things to do with me,â Birkin told Tim Lewis. âSo I was extremely happy. He was as jealous as I was. And although now people consider him as really quite a genius in France, which indeed he was, he was never a boring genius. He never said: âWell, now Iâm going to go up to work.â I never saw him work. No, when I did rather bad films, he had a tendency of writing his best stuff because he was pissed off that I was not there. He used to come on to all the film sets, then sit miserably in the hotel bedroom where he wrote âThe Man with the Cabbage Headâ or Melody Nelson. In that way it was a rather ideal thirteen years.â
As Jessica Kiang notes in the essay accompanying our release of Jacques Derayâs sultry thriller La piscine (1969), Gainsbourg issued a public warning to stars Alain Delon and Maurice Ronet to keep their hands off Birkin, who plays the eighteen-year-old daughter of the old friend (Ronet) who barges in on a couple (Delon and Romy Schneider) enjoying a summer holiday on the CĂ´te dâAzur. In 1971, Birkin gave birth to Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Birkin laterâand oftenâclaimed that her daughter was a far more talented actor than she ever was.
The French, though, were charmed by Birkinâs wispy British accent, and moviegoers around the world were drawn to the elegant lines of her slim figure; the delicate shape of her lips, which always seemed to be slightly parted to reveal the thin gaps between her teeth; her impeccable sense of fashion; and the way she could make just a pair of jeans and a t-shirt hangâor clingâperfectly. Hermès famously created a high-end handbag for her (and of course, anyone else with the means), the Birkin.
Birkin played Bardotâs lover in Roger Vadimâs Don Juan, or If Don Juan Were a Woman (1973), appeared alongside Pierre Richard in Claude Zidiâs Lucky Pierre (1974)ââJane, so funny, so smart, so fragile, so generous, so everything! A piece of my heart goes with her,â Richard tweeted on Sundayâand portrayed the androgynous Johnny, who catches the eye of Joe Dallesandroâs gay trucker in Gainsbourgâs directorial debut, Je tâaime moi non plus (1976). Looking back on her work on the film with Gainsbourg in 2016, Birkin told Craig Hubert in the New York Times that âIâve never known him happier. He was so happy with what we gave, and we gave everything. I was so pleased to have pleased him.â
Between two Agatha Christie adaptations, John Guillerminâs Death on the Nile (1978) and Guy Hamiltonâs Evil Under the Sun (1982), Birkin left Gainsbourg, whose alcoholism was making him impossible to live with. The two remained close, though, and Birkin carried on recording and performing his music long after he died in 1991.
In 1981, Jacques Doillon directed Birkin in The Prodigal Daughter, the first of several features they made together over the following ten years. âThey were probably the best films I did,â Birkin told Hubert. âJacques is somebody who is quite extraordinary with actors. He would rather do one hundred takes if necessary. Heâs looking for the accident; heâs not looking for the polished performance. I knew that if I jumped, he would be there to receive me. He wouldnât opt for anything less.â In the New York Times,Elisabeth Vincentelli writes that her performance in Doillonâs The Pirate (1984) âfelt like a new Jane Birkin, inhabiting her physicality in a way that was almost dangerously unrestrainedâand it earned her the first of three CĂŠsar Award nominations.â Doillon and Birkinâs daughter, the singer, actor, and model Lou Doillon, was born in 1982.
Immediately after Birkin saw Vagabond (1985), she jotted off a note of appreciation to director Agnès Vardaâwho couldnât read Birkinâs handwriting. Varda invited Birkin for a long walk and the two of them dreamed up a pair of interrelated films. Kung-Fu Master! (1988) was Birkinâs idea. She plays a woman who, having just turned forty, finds herself romantically drawn to a fourteen-year-old boy (Mathieu Demy, the son of Varda and Jacques Demy) whoâs obsessed with video games.
Following a sort of dream logic, the playful Jane B. par Agnès V. (1988) is both the directorâs portrait of the actor and a telling self-portrait. Vardaâs admiration of Birkin is âunequivocal,â writes Glenn Kenny in the New York Times. âAnd it not infrequently bleeds into outright cinematic adoration.â Birkin âembodies the strong subject who chooses to be relatively agreeable to a certain level of objectification. While the word feminism is never uttered in this movie, Jane B. par Agnès V. is an exemplary feminist work, one in which two female artists, self-aware but hardly self-conscious, create beauty by exchanging notes.â
Jean-Luc Godard cast Birkin in Keep Your Right Up (1987) âas a hedonistic young woman zooming around with her lover in a convertible,â writes Guardianâs Peter Bradshaw. âBirkin spoke with humor and generosity about the bizarre experience of being directed by Godard on his most cantankerous and difficult form.â In Bertrand Tavernierâs Daddy Nostalgia (1990), Birkin plays a screenwriter who bonds for the first time with her dying father (Dirk Bogarde).
Rivette first directed Birkin in La Belle Noiseuse (1991), which Ryan Gilbey, writing for the Guardian, calls a âspellbinding four-hour study of a painter (Michel Piccoli) and his new muse (Emmanuelle BĂŠart), in which Birkin played the artistâs wife and former model, who must deal with the indignity of having her younger self literally painted over.â Birkin worked with Alain Resnais just once, taking a modest but memorable role in the 1997 musical Same Old Song.
In 2007, Birkin took the first and only feature she directed to Cannes, where it premiered in the Un Certain Regard program. Boxes, written shortly after her father died, is loosely based on her own life, and Birkin herself plays Anna, a middle-aged woman sorting through her memories. The cast includes Geraldine Chaplin as her mother and Michel Piccoli as her father as well as John Hurt, Annie Girardot, Adèle Exarchopoulos, and her own real-life daughter, Lou Doillon.
Her other surviving daughter, Charlotte Gainsbourg, came to terms with her mixed feelings toward her mother by directing her own first feature, Jane by Charlotte (2021). In the New York Times,Beatrice Loayza calls it âa meandering and elusive documentary portraitâ and suggests that Gainsbourg âmight have made the film for no one but herself.â Perhaps Gainsbourg needed the framework of the project in order to eventually bring herself to say, as she does toward the end, âI have always loved you, but itâs much clearer to me now.â
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