Tag: Jane Birkin

Jane Birkin: ‘Serge Gainsbourg was a provocateur with a wildly romantic soul’

In 2013, Jane Birkin, who died on Sunday, spoke with Le Monde about singer Serge Gainsbourg, who was her partner and wrote many songs for her.

After Serge Gainsbourg met you, in 1968, he never appeared alone in a photo. We know that actresses attract photographers, but did Gainsbourg become Mr. Birkin by your side?

No, it’s much more prosaic than that. I had just arrived from England. We were starting a life together. I think Serge simply wanted to introduce me to the French. Right from our first collaboration, he put me in the spotlight. On the cover of the album Je T’Aime… Moi Non Plus, he preferred to show my face… with my big teeth! It was a very conscious decision. He wanted me to be associated with this success.

Later, when I took part in protests for abortion rights or against the death penalty, he was very concerned. It wasn’t a question of conviction. I knew his ideas. But showing up at these rallies, which were unpopular at the time, seemed risky to him. I had to be a star that was accepted by the French.

[ . . . ]

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Jane Birkin obituary

By Ryam Gilbey

Singer and actor who duetted with Serge Gainsbourg on Je T’aime … Moi Non Plus in 1969 and went on to a prolific film career

The sultry 1969 hit single Je T’aime … Moi Non Plus was a four-and-a-half-minute distillation of languid Gallic cool, in which a Frenchman, his voice coarsened by Gitanes, is heard billing and cooing with an ecstatically sighing young Englishwoman over the swirling motif of a baroque organ. That man was Serge Gainsbourg; his companion was Jane Birkin, the actor and singer, who has died aged 76. Though Birkin worked with some of the world’s finest film-makers, including Jacques Rivette and Agnès Varda, she knew that Je T’aime … would be remembered above everything else she did. “When I die, that’ll be the tune they play, as I go out feet first,” she said.

Birkin was 21 when she and Gainsbourg met while starring together in the film Slogan (1969). He was 40, and had previously recorded Je T’aime … as a duet with Brigitte Bardot, only for the actor to withdraw permission for it to be released. Birkin had already starred in a 1965 musical, Passion Flower Hotel, scored by John Barry, whom she married that year at the age of 19 and from whom she was divorced in 1968; he was the father of Kate, the first of Birkin’s three daughters. But it was on the duet with Gainsbourg, she said, that for the first time “somebody thought I had a pretty voice”.

She sang her part an octave higher than Bardot. “It gave it a choirboy side that [Gainsbourg] liked a lot,” she said. Rumours that the vocal track was recorded under the covers during a moment of intimacy were untrue (the couple were standing at separate microphones in a studio in central London) though they did nothing to harm the mythology surrounding a song that was later condemned by the Vatican. “I just remember thinking it was all terribly funny,” she said. [ . . . ]

Continue at source: Jane Birkin obituary | Jane Birkin | The Guardian

Jane Birkin: ‘Serge Gainsbourg was never a boring genius’ 

Jane Birkin.
 

Jane Birkin began keeping a diary aged 11, with the entries addressed to her beloved stuffed toy Munkey. She was born in London; her mother was an actor and her father a spy during the second world war. Birkin’s concerns, initially, were typically teenage – boarding school, boys – but quickly become more juicy: aged 18, she married the James Bond composer John Barry; a year later, she appeared in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup. In her 20s, she became involved (creatively and romantically) with the French musician Serge Gainsbourg and set out on a lifelong path of singing, acting, writing and being one of the most renowned muses of the 20th century and beyond. Now 73, she lives in Paris with her bulldog – regularly seeing her daughters Charlotte Gainsbourg and Lou Doillon, who are both actors and musicians; her oldest daughter Kate Barry, a photographer, died in 2013. Munkey Diaries: 1957-1982 is published this month.

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Serge Gainsbourg & Jane Birkin “Je t’aime… moi non plus” from 1969

“Je t’aime… moi non plus” (French for “I love you… me neither”) is a 1967 song written by Serge Gainsbourg for Brigitte Bardot. In 1969, Gainsbourg recorded the best known version with Jane Birkin. The duet reached number one in the UK, and number two in Ireland, but was banned in several countries due to its overtly sexual content.
In 1976, Gainsbourg directed Birkin in an erotic film of the same name.