Jane Birkin, singer and actor, has died age 76
The French-English singer, actor and fashion icon Jane Birkin has died at the age of 76, the French Culture Ministry has confirmed.
“This departure is so sad. She was a beautiful person,” former Culture Minister Roselyne Bachelot told BFM.
A noted singer and actor, Birkin gained widespread notoriety following her relationship with controversial singer-songwriter Serge Gainsbourg. She became an icon of fashion thanks to her effortless style, exemplified when Hermès used her name to create one of their most widely loved bags.
Beginning her career as an actor in London and featuring most notably in Michaelangelo Antonini’s generation-defining movie Blow Up, Birkin’s career would go from strength to strength in the 1960s. Appearing in 1968’s Slogan, Birkin would meet Gainsbourg and begin a whirlwind romance that would culminate in their 1969 album Jane Birkin/Serge Gainsbourg and the controversial 1976 song Je t’aime moi non plus.
Reflecting on her career and work with Serge Gainsbourg in 2013, she acted with supreme humility and noted: “[It is] very flattering to have the most beautiful songs, probably, in the French language written for [you]. [But] how much talent did I really have? Perhaps not that much.”
“We must have represented a form of freedom,” Birkin said of the image that the proto-power couple presented to the awestruck Republique and beyond. “The twenty-year age gap, our lifestyle, we went out at night and came home to wake up Kate and Charlotte before school, and then slept in the daytime. That was my fantasy, our lack of taboos [ … ]. Serge used to say: ‘We are not an immoral couple, we are an amoral couple’.”
The pair split in 1980 while Birkin continued to enjoy a rich career, starring in two beloved Agatha Christie adaptations, Death on the Nile and 1982’s Evil Under the Sun.
In 2016 she received an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Live Action Short Film’ for La femme et le TGV. It would be Birkin’s final acting credit and put a rubber stamp on a truly eclectic career.
Birkin is survived by her two children, singer and actor Charlotte Gainsbourg and musician Lou Doillon. Birkin’s third child, photographer Kate Barry, died in 2013.
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