Symbol of Swinging Sixties Jane Birkin dies, aged 76
The actress and singer’s steamy hit with her French partner Serge Gainsbourg and the couple’s wild lifestyle became an avatar for the time.
Shortly after Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg had recorded the infamously erotic Je t’aime . . . moi non plus, the couple went to dinner at the Hotel des Beaux Arts in Paris.
“There was a record player, and without saying a word, Serge put the song on,” Birkin recalled. “All of a sudden all the couples around us stopped talking, their knives and forks held in mid-air.”
As their fellow diners sat transfixed by the record’s sexually explicit lyrics interspersed with Birkin’s orgasmic gasps and moans, Gainsbourg turned to his lover. “I think we’ve got a hit record,” he said.
Indeed, the duo not only had a hit but a song that would become an avatar for the Swinging Sixties and its sexual permissiveness – a “symbol of freedom”, as Birkin called it.
Prudes and moral guardians everywhere were outraged. The Vatican denounced the record and the BBC banned it, as did countless other radio stations around the world. The critic Sylvie Simmons described the song as “the musical equivalent of a Vaseline-smeared Emmanuelle movie”, and the aural sex that oozed from the grooves was too libidinous even for the traditional Gallic laissez-faire: the record was declared too risque to be played on French radio before an 11pm watershed. In Italy the head of Gainsbourg and Birkin’s record label was jailed for offending public morality.
The bans only served to enhance the record’s success and Gainsbourg called Pope Paul VI “our greatest PR man”. Je t’aime . . . moi non plus hit No 1 in the UK charts in the autumn of 1969, the first banned record to do so. It remained in the charts for 31 weeks and was said to have contributed to a dramatic spike in the birthrate.
A prurient media speculated that it was a genuine live sex session recorded in the boudoir rather than faked in the studio, although Gainsbourg denied it. “Thank goodness it wasn’t, otherwise I hope it would have been a long-playing record,” he said. Birkin giggled alongside him as he said it.
Birkin had arrived in Paris in 1968 as a 21-year-old aspiring actress with an androgynous figure and an innocent baby-doll look that had earned her a role in Antonioni’s “swinging London” movie Blow-Up. She also had a one-year-old daughter from a brief marriage to the film composer John Barry, who as soon as she had fallen pregnant left her for an even younger model and moved to Los Angeles.
Feeling emotionally raw and insecure, Birkin was forced to move back into her parents’ home but was persuaded to screen test for the French director Pierre Grimblat’s film Slogan, in which Gainsbourg was cast as the male lead.
Unable to speak a word of French, she turned up “looking pretty stupid and goofy and ill-at-ease” and initially found Gainsbourg “arrogant” and “caustic”. To her surprise she landed the part and he invited his ingenue co-star to dinner, followed by a wild night on the town until 6am, Gainsbourg tipping 100 franc notes everywhere they went.
With the sun rising, he took her to the Hilton, where the staff asked if he wanted his usual room. “In the lift as we were going up, I was pulling faces to myself, thinking, gosh, how could I have got myself into such a mess?” Birkin recalled. Once in his room, she went to the bathroom and by the time she re-emerged he had fallen asleep in a drunken stupor. She slipped unnoticed out of the door and returned to her own hotel.
Her resistance did not last long and although he was 20 years her senior, they became inseparable in a relationship that lasted a dozen turbulent years. Birkin – whom Gainsbourg called “Janette” – became France’s favourite “petite Anglaise” and something of a national treasure. “They found me amusing, in large part because of my accent and the mistakes I made in French,” she said. “It’s one of the reasons I never sought to improve it.”
The couple’s bohemian lifestyle and disregard for bourgeois convention shocked and charmed Parisian society in almost equal measure. “We went out all night and came home to wake up the children before school, and then slept in the daytime,” Birkin said. “That was my fantasy, our lack of taboos. Serge used to say: ‘We are not an immoral couple, we are an amoral couple.’ ”
Stories about their “lack of taboos” became legendary. During dinner at the famous Paris restaurant Maxim’s, Birkin slipped several pieces of the monogrammed silver cutlery into her bag. On leaving the restaurant, she stopped to sign an autograph and her bag fell open and spilt its contraband onto the pavement. A liveried waiter promptly offered to bring her more.
On another night, they dined with Arthur Rubinstein, who was in his late eighties at the time. Birkin complained that the great pianist was groping her under the table. “Let him, Janette, he’s a genius,” Gainsbourg replied.
When they separated in 1980, he ungallantly told her: “You are on your way down, I am on my way up.” Yet they continued their musical partnership and her post-break-up albums of Gainsbourg’s songs, Baby Alone in Babylone (1983) and Amours des feintes (1990), were among the finest of her career.
She continued to make her home in Paris and for 13 years lived with the film director Jacques Doillon before they separated in the 1990s. He was said to be unable to come to terms with her inconsolable grief following Gainbourg’s death in 1991. “Chaos, silence and darkness. Serge is dead. Impossible,” she wrote. That she placed her much-loved childhood stuffed monkey in his coffin was a sign that he had remained her grande passione.
She is survived by two daughters, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Lou Doillon, both actors and singers. Her first daughter, the fashion photographer Kate Barry, died in 2013 at the age of 46, after falling from her fourth-floor apartment in Paris.
Even after being diagnosed with leukaemia in 2002, Birkin had conducted her life with “an absolutely unfounded optimism”, but the loss of her daughter left her distraught and guilt-wracked. Her death was recorded as suicide and her mother recalled how, as a teenager, Kate had truanted from school, stayed out all night in the Paris clubs and battled drug and alcohol addictions. Birkin stopped writing the diary she had kept all her life on the night Kate died. “There was nothing left to say . . . the carpet had been pulled from under my feet,” she wrote in a 2019 memoir.
Jane Mallory Birkin was born in December 1946 in London. Her mother, Judy Campbell, was a famous actress and singer who was Noel Coward’s muse and for whom A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square was written before Vera Lynn took up the song. Her father, David Birkin, was a lieutenant commander in the Royal Navy and a Second World War spy.
She grew up in Chelsea and enjoyed a close and enduring relationship with her older brother, the screenwriter and director Andrew Birkin, who later wrote a book titled Jane & Serge: A Family Album.
Less happy was her time boarding at Upper Chine School on the Isle of Wight, where she was bullied. “The others said I was half-boy, half-girl. I had no breasts, not even a developing bosom. It was horrible,” she recalled.
She was 18 and “the oldest virgin in Chelsea” when she met Barry after she had been cast in the 1965 West End musical Passion Flower Hotel, for which he had written the score. Within months they were married.
“I was very conventional and I didn’t go off with different people,” she recalled. “I rather wish I had, seeing all the fun everyone else was having.” Instead, she devoted herself to being a model wife. When Newsweek profiled her husband, a picture caption read: “John Barry and his E-type Jaguar and E-type wife.”
When she disrobed in Antonioni’s 1966 movie Blow-Up, she did so as a dare after Barry told her she’d never show herself naked on screen because she “always turned the lights out at home” before undressing.
Any lingering inhibitions were shed two years later when she recorded Je t’aime . . . moi non plus. She later confessed “jealousy” had persuaded her to do it as Gainsbourg had recorded an earlier and unreleased version with his previous girlfriend Brigitte Bardot.
As fate would have it, several years later Birkin and Bardot were cast as lesbian lovers in Roger Vadim’s 1973 movie Don Juan, or If Don Juan Were a Woman. “We had a bed scene together but Vadim hadn’t given us any inkling of what we were supposed to do in bed,” Birkin recalled. “So we’re both lying there and Bardot said: ‘Perhaps we should sing a little song. How about Je t’aime?,” Birkin refused, and instead suggested My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean.
There were numerous other film appearances, among them Death on the Nile (1978) and Dust, which won a prize at the 1975 Venice Film Festival. Yet like Bardot, her acting skills seemed secondary to her role as a style icon, cast forever in our mind’s eye as the willowy epitome of the Swinging Sixties, or in later years clutching the famously expensive handbag that Hermes named after her.
If it seemed unfair that in the public’s mind she remained inextricably associated with a man with whom she was in a relationship for no more than a dozen years, Birkin herself seemed to want it that way. “It was incredible meeting someone who found me beautiful and decidedly erotic,” she was still telling interviewers when in her seventies. “Serge reconciled me with myself. When a man loves you, it changes everything.”
Jane Birkin, singer and actress, was born on December 14, 1946. She died after a period of illness on July 16, 2023, aged 76.
The Times
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