2023-07-16 14:23:21
French-British singer and actress Jane Birkin, 76, was found dead at her home in Paris on Sunday, a source close to her said. The artist, who was a partner of the French singer Serge Gainsbourg, recently said that she had health problems, and she was forced to cancel concerts.
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The cause of death and other details have not been released at this time.
Birkin rose to fame thanks to her turbulent relationship with legendary musician, composer, performer and poet Serge Gainsbourg and her accentuated French style. And she achieved enormous fame when she, together with her partner, recorded the sensual song I love you…my neitherwhich was first written by Serge Gainsbourg for Brigitte Bardot, with whom he had an affair.
Bardot banned the initial version of the song, featuring her vocals, and with that decision paved the way for Jane Birkin to become a legend.
Birkin rose to stardom in the 1960s, when the cultural relationship between France and Great Britain was going through a particularly fertile period. With an androgynous silhouette and adolescent beauty, Birkin embodied like few others the style between bohemian and chic, which years later would be inherited by his daughter, Charlotte Gainsbourg, one of the most outstanding actresses in French cinema.
Londoner of origin, and French national, already in February she appeared in a very fragile state at the last César ceremony, the annual French film awards, together with her daughter and granddaughter Alice.
Birkin rose to fame thanks to her turbulent relationship with legendary musician, composer, performer, and poet Serge Gainsbourg.
The public adored her for her sensitivity and her peculiar British accent, which she always kept.
“Unimaginable to live in a world without your light”, wrote on Instagram the singer Étienne Daho, one of his close friends, co-author of his album “Oh, pardon your dormais…”, published in 2020.
French President Emmanuel Macron paid tribute to a “complete artist” who “sang the most beautiful words of our language.”
Passion, glamor and hard times
On the big screen Jane Birkin acted in “Blow up”, Antonioni’s film crowned with the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1967, and in “The Pool”, with Romy Schneider and Alain Delon in 1969. He has also worked with directors such as Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Doillon and Agnès Varda.
The relationship with Serge Gainsbourg, whom he met on a set in 1968, gave his career a new direction. And with him she formed a mythical duo in the Paris of the 1970s, wrapped in passion, glamor and scandals.
Overwhelmed by the relationship with a sometimes excessive and violent Gainsbourg, Jane Birkin left the family apartment in Paris in 1981, with her daughters Kate (born from her union with the British composer John Barry) and Charlotte.
The actress rebuilt her life with filmmaker Jacques Doillon for 13 years and they had a daughter, Lou. «Despite appearances, I carry something infinitely sad inside me, a terrible sense of guilt that has not left me since childhood. Jacques guessed that », she will explain on one occasion.
Long following the death of Serge Gainsbourg in 1991, and despite very hard moments such as the death of his daughter Kate Barry, in 2013, and a difficult-to-cure leukemia, Birkin continued to sing songs by the French musician, with whom he formed a couple legendary.
In addition, it inspired an emblematic bag from the house of Hermès, the Birkin that continues to be sold all over the world. In 2008 she released her first album with her own songs, “Enfants d’hiver”. But her success will remain inextricably linked to Serge Gainsbourg, as with the “Arabesque” tour and the self-titled album, in 2022.
Jane Birkin was an Officer of the Order of the British Empire and in France a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters. She but she rejected the Legion of Honor in 1989, considering that “only heroes” are deserving of such recognition.
A way to honor the memory of his father David, a British Navy officer who transported resistance fighters from the United Kingdom to France during World War II. He passed away in 1991, the day of Serge Gainsbourg’s funeral.
© Agence France-Presse
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