Style icon: singer and actress Jane Birkin is dead

Status: 5:30 p.m | Reading time: 4 minutes

DThe British-French singer and actress Jane Birkin has died at the age of 76. According to insiders, Birkin was found dead at her home in Paris on Sunday. Numerous French media report unanimously on the death of the style icon. She was found lifeless in her apartment in Paris on Sunday. A spokesman for the city of Paris confirmed this.

Among other things, Birkin was known for the song “Je t’aime … moi non plus”, which she recorded in 1969 with her then partner Serge Gainsbourg.

In addition to music, acting was Birkin’s second great passion, and she appeared in about 70 films.

The native British actress drew attention to herself early on, playing a model in Michelangelo Antonioni’s legendary film “Blow Up” around 1966. In 1984, the Hermès company named the “Birkin Bag” after her, a coveted luxury leather bag that became a classic.

also read

also read

She was born in London in 1946, the middle of three children. The mother was an actress, the father in the Navy. At 19 she married the much older film music composer John Barry, known from 007 films. Daughter Kate was born in 1967, soon after Jane Birkin separated from her husband and moved to France in 1968. The young actress impressed alongside Alain Delon and Romy Schneider in the thriller “The Swimming Pool”, a deadly drama about love and jealousy.

She met Serge Gainsbourg while filming Slogan (1969) and the two became a couple, both professionally and privately. Daughter Charlotte was born in 1971 and is now an actress herself. Gainsbourg wrote Jane the song “Jane B.” and then directed the film “Je t’aime,” starring Jane as a boyish waitress who falls in love with a gay trucker. Birkin split from Gainsbourg in 1980, but they remained friends and continued to work together.

She never managed to love permanently, she told the Swiss “Tagblatt” in 2020. “I even ran away from Serge. What can I say? My loved ones never lasted.”

After Gainsbourg’s death in 1991, she withdrew from the music scene for a long time and only began releasing songs in 1998. In her intense and long career, Birkin worked for important directors, including Alain Resnais in Life is a Chanson (1997), Jacques Rivette in The Beautiful Troublemaker (1991), where she posed as the wife of a painter (Michel Piccoli ) caught up in jealousy. In Michel Deville’s “The Wild Sheep” (1974), she shone alongside Jean-Louis Trintignant as a naïve, easily seductive young girl.

The seemingly good maid with unexpected blackmailing skills, she played impressively in the Agatha Christie adaptation Death on the Nile (1978) and four years later she was in another Christie adaptation, Guy Hamilton’s Evil Under the Sun. , the cunning accomplice in a murder. Jacques Doillon, father of Birkin’s daughter Lou Doillon, who was born in 1982, shot the lesbian love drama “The Pirate” (1984) with her.

An immeasurable loss for her was the death of her daughter Kate, who died in Paris in 2013 after falling out of a window. It was never clarified whether it was suicide or an accident. Birkin’s song “Oh! Pardon tu dormais” was a touching attempt to deal with it.

In 2007 she also began directing. The feature film “Boxes” is a personal review of her life, relationships, children, career. In it, Birkin plays an elderly woman named Anna who, after moving house, is squatting between cartons and boxes. As soon as she opens one of these, memories flood up, translated into scenes with fellow actors such as Michel Piccoli and Annie Girardot.

In recent years, Birkin has repeatedly had health problems. In her 2018 biography, she speaks openly about her battle with leukemia. In September 2021, she had to cancel her participation in the Deauville film festival due to a mild stroke.