BIRKIN, Jane Mallory OBE 1946-2023
Richard R
From BBC news online Sunday 16 July 2023:
Singer and actress Jane Birkin dead at 76 - reports
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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
...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”.
...Birkin’s life remained inextricably linked to his. They were together for 11 years, and had a daughter, Charlotte, who became a successful singer and actor. Even after they separated in 1980, he continued to write for her, and she went on performing his songs for the rest of her life.
....She was born in London to Judy Campbell, an actor who had been a muse to Noël Coward, and David Birkin, who was a lieutenant commander in the Royal Navy and a spy during the second world war. His duties included taking British spies across the Channel to France and bringing back stranded airmen and escaped prisoners of war.
Jane was educated at Upper Chine school on the Isle of Wight. At 17 she starred with Ralph Richardson in Graham Greene’s play Carving a Statue; Greene himself had a hand in casting her. Her screen acting career began with a walk-on part in The Knack … and How to Get It (1965) and a controversial nude scene in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up, which she agreed to because Barry had told her she wouldn’t dare.
Birkin was tremendous fun in two star-studded Agatha Christie thrillers, Death on the Nile (1978) and Evil Under the Sun (1982). In the cryptic Love on the Ground (1984), Rivette cast her and Geraldine Chaplin as actors drawn into a playwright’s mysterious world. She appeared in two films, The Pirate (1984) and Comedy! (1987), made by her then partner, Jacques Doillon, with whom she had her third daughter, Lou, also a singer and actor. Jean-Luc Godard directed her in Keep Your Right Up (also 1987), while for Varda she played a woman besotted with a 14-year-old boy in Kung-Fu Master! (1988); the film co-starred Charlotte and featured Lou, and was inspired by an idea by Birkin herself.
.....Her two most impressive performances came in Bertrand Tavernier’s These Foolish Things, aka Daddy Nostalgie (1990), in which she was moving as a woman trying to repair her relationship with her dying father (Dirk Bogarde); and La Belle Noiseuse (1991), Rivette’s spellbinding four-hour study of a painter (Michel Piccoli) and his new muse (Emmanuelle Béart), in which Birkin played the artist’s wife and former model, who must deal with the indignity of having her younger self literally painted over.
.....She is survived by Charlotte and Lou, and six grandchildren, and by her brother, Andrew, and sister, Linda. Kate, a photographer, died in 2013.
Jane Mallory Birkin, actor and singer, born 14 December 1946; died 16 July 2023
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2023/jul/16/jane-birkin-obituary
Richard R
Obit in the Times of 17 July 2023:
E X T R A C T
Jane Birkin, actress and singer, dies aged 76
English-born star rose to fame for her musical and romantic partnership with Serge Gainsbourg and enjoyed a prolific career in France
…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…
…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…
…Jane Mallory Birkin was born in December 1946 in London. Her mother, Judy Campbell, was a famous actress and singer who was Noël 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…
Jane Birkin, singer and actress, was born on December 14, 1946. She died on July 16, 2023, aged 76
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/jane-birkin-actress-and-singer-dies-aged-76-snwhcm3ql