French actress and singer Lou Doillon has found her own place

FRENCH actress and model turned singer Lou Doillon has come to terms with the influence of her famous parent.

Lou Doillon has emerged as a formidable musical talent. Picture: Mathieu Zazzo

THE French media is not particularly kind to over-achievers, according to singer Lou Doillon. When the over-achiever is also young, beautiful, French and has famous parents, it can get really ugly.

Such was Doillon's experience early in her career - or rather careers - before she decided to become a singer-songwriter.

The daughter of French film director Jacques Doillon and France-based English actress and singer Jane Birkin made a name for herself as an actress and model before she took to writing pop songs and released her debut album, Places, last year.

Now, having sold more than 300,000 copies of her album, mainly in France, the 31-year-old Parisian feels she has found her true metier and can laugh about her media anxieties.

"The French press can be very harsh and the one thing they can't bear is multi-tasking," she says in a refined English-with-a hint-of-French accent.

"They despise it to the highest degree, so from the age of five I've been taught that if I did two things at the same time it meant I didn't know how to do one. It's an obsession that they have."

With that in mind Doillon was careful not to spruik her musical talent in the fashion or film worlds when the album was released in September last year. Instead she waited for respected music critics to latch on to it, which they did. So glowing were the reviews that Doillon ended up on the covers of music magazines in France rather than on the pages of Vogue and Elle.

Doillon has been the face of Givenchy and has worked on campaigns for Gap Inc, Barneys New York and Lee Cooper in her modelling career, while she made her film debut playing her mother's daughter in Kung Fu Master (1988), at the age of six. She has made 17 feature films since then, including a handful by her father, the most recent of which, Un enfant de toi, was released last year.

For now, though, Doillon is settled on a musical path, one that will bring her to Australia for the first time for a series of shows that includes performances at the So Frenchy So Chic in the Park Festival in Melbourne and Sydney in January. The festival also features French acts Fefe, Babylon Circus and Lilly Wood & the Prick.

Doillon has become a professional musician relatively late, but her interest in music has been lifelong. "As a little girl I had huge fantasies about music," she says. Indeed it shouldn't come as a surprise that singing and songwriting are part of Doillon's DNA.

Her mother has been writing, recording and performing since the late 1960s, when she had her biggest success, the sexy international hit Je t'aime ... moi non plus, with her mentor and partner Serge Gainsbourg. One of Doillon's five half-sisters is the couple's daughter, actress Charlotte Gainsbourg. The others are Kate Barry, from Birkin's marriage to English composer John Barry, and Lily, Lola and Lina Doillon on her father's side. Birkin's relationship with Jacques Doillon ended in the 90s.

"I've got a gang," she says of her siblings, "who are all wonderful for various reasons. I get on wonderfully with Charlotte, also because we have kids that are the same age. It's sometimes hard for people to understand how close we all are."

Doillon has an 11-year-old son, Marlowe, from a short-term relationship with musician John Mitchell. She cites Mitchell as another influence on her artistic aspirations, alongside her parents.

She says it took time to "understand the influence I was getting from my mum and from my dad. I come from a strange family and I'm in a strange generation.

"My mum is deeply, deeply a man's woman, a man's muse. Maybe because I'm a kid from the 80s I'm a bit more dominant. I wanted to be the muse and the director also. I wanted to be the man and the woman.

"Maybe that's why it took me 26 years waiting for someone to write me an album and to be crazy in love with me and think I was the most amazing thing in the world.

"That never came. So I decided I'm the man of the family so I'll write my own bloody album and forget about the rest."

The album Places blends slick pop with elements of folk and jazz on songs about relationships such as ICU, Defiant and Jealousy. Stylistically it sits somewhere between Lily Allen and Francoise Hardy, although Doillon cites a variety of influences, from the Clash and Siouxsie and the Banshees to Screaming Jay Hawkins and Leonard Cohen.

She has invested a fair amount of herself into the lyrics as well. "I don't believe you can write something that doesn't have to do with you," she says.

Cohen was a particular influence when she was growing up, in a household where music had to be respected and listened to properly even if, in the case of her non-English-speaking father, the lyrics were beyond comprehension.

"Because my father was a movie director and not a musician there was a lot of respect for music in our house," she says. "You didn't talk and you really listened to the music. There would be these long hours listening to the lyrics of Leonard Cohen - Famous Blue Raincoat - that my father didn't understand, but I understood them."

Although she has always been comfortable in front of a camera and has also worked in theatre, Doillon finds being on stage as a singer a refreshing challenge. She performed to an audience for the first time only last year.

"I guess what it means to be an artist is a very strange mixture of elements," she says. "On stage there is tremendous ego. 'Oh this is normal ... 2000 people are coming to listen to my songs ... of course!' You need to be completely nuts. On the other side you have to have a beautiful humility to be brave enough to go on stage and potentially be hated by 2000 people.

"As an actress you always have this thing that protects you, which is your character. Even when I was doing Beckett for two years, suddenly you realise not only you have a fear, but the audience has a fear as well. It's a beautiful tension, but sometimes it doesn't allow the actor to enjoy moments of euphoria.

"With music people can come and go, snog their girlfriend, close their eyes, to free themselves. To be part of that communion can be the most intense thing in the world and you get to go on stage without hiding behind a character. It's very exciting."

And she's grateful that after being born to a life somewhere in the arts or entertainment world she has finally found her mark.

"It took me so long to get to the music, where that was what I wanted to do all my life," she says. "It took me so long to realise that it wasn't really movies that I wanted to do, but to be on stage singing."

Lou Doillon performs at So Frenchy So Chic in the Park Festival in Melbourne on January 12 and Sydney on January 18; also on her own at Brisbane Powerhouse on January 15 and Adelaide Festival Centre on January 16. Doillon's album Places is available through Cartell Music/UMA.