Jane Birkin
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Unreal!!Glittery_Bug
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http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article5156097.ece
Jane Birkin on Serge Gainsbourg and Enfants d'hiver
Jane Birkin, France's favourite English rose, is singing songs that she wrote herself. Serge would approve, she insists
At the Musée de la Musique in Paris, a major exhibition dedicated to the late Serge Gainsbourg has just opened. The ne plus ultra of Gallic style and insouciance, Gainsbourg is a national icon and the exhibition is a fitting tribute to his status. The only problem is, it's a Monday and the Musée de la Musique is closed. Step up, Jane Birkin, honorary Frenchwoman, former lover and muse to Gainsbourg, and wielder of considerable influence in the world of Parisian museum opening times.
“I'm sure they could open it up for you!” she says as she calls up the museum's director. Sure enough, they do. Such is the respect accorded to this English actress and singer in her adopted country - and the level to which Birkin and Gainsbourg are still associated.
“Every day, five times a day, I have taxi drivers talking to me about Serge,” says Birkin, who, with her short, tousled hair and expressive face free of make-up, looks not so different from the gamine that France first fell in love with back in 1969. “But I'm glad because when we were together I never felt he got his due. It was only when we were no longer together that the young people started to discover him. Now French culture is talked of as before and after Serge.”
One gets the impression that there's a before and after Serge with Birkin too. We are in the Japanese-themed bar of an hotel in Saint Germain, a neighbourhood with a blend of bourgeois chic and bohemian charm in which you feel that Birkin, whose accent reveals British officer-class roots despite 40 years in Paris, is very much at home. She is here to talk about Enfants d'hiver, her first album of entirely self-penned material. It uses elegant, understated settings to carry some very personal, intimate lyrics about childhood and growing older, and she's aware of the need to do justice to Gainsbourg's influence.
“I knew from Serge how much artistry it takes to put the maximum emotion into the minimum of words,” says Birkin on the challenge of writing songs after so many decades of singing other people's. “And I was thinking: maybe I should write my own stuff. Maybe if people knew that I was so terribly ordinary underneath my public image, they might feel the words had been written just for them.”
Perhaps remarkably, given that she's 62, Birkin believes that Enfants d'hiver is the first work she's done that isn't trying to please somebody else. “It's about the wildness of family holidays when I was a child, the wildness I've tried to give my own children, and the importance of family. To this day I couldn't imagine not being with my brother and sister and children for Christmas. I'm also not worrying if I still sing in an English accent after being in France for the past 40 years.”
“Do you still have an accent?” I ask.
“Oh God! It's atrocious. Unlike actresses such as Charlotte Rampling and Kristin Scott Thomas, I never learnt French grammar. Getting the word right was enough, and whether it had a ‘le' or a ‘la' before it didn't bother me at all.”
Most of the themes of Enfants d'hiver developed from Boxes (2007), Birkin's debut as a feature-film director. The story of a woman sifting through the memories of her life as she unpacks after moving home, it is clearly autobiographical.
“I was thinking about the nostalgia of childhood, of the majestic figures of your parents in the doorways of your life,” she says. She talks breathlessly as one memory after another tumbles out. “I remember being frightened at a place called Hop Castle,” she says. “Ma drove us in a Triumph Herald, and there were gloomy flowers like foxgloves around the place, and I gasped because we visited a tiny house made of skulls. The whole wonder of it is so exciting. We were winter children. It was the happiest time in my life.”
The personal spills over into the public in Birkin's life. It's hard to avoid, given that two of her daughters, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Lou Doillon, are successful actresses, and that the three men she's had daughters with - the English composer John Barry (father to her first, Kate), Gainsbourg and the film director Jacques Doillon - are all famous too.
Her activism is a product of personal tragedy. In 2001 her brother, the screenwriter and director Andrew Birkin, lost his 20-year-old son Anno in a car crash in Italy. Andrew set up an African charity in his son's honour and this led Jane to reassess her own responsibility as a public figure. A track about the Burmese political prisoner Aung San Suu Kyi on Enfants d'hiver, as well as a high-profile campaign for her release and a plea for governments to pull out investments from Burma, are among the products of this.
“I met Aung San Suu Kyi in Rangoon,” she says. “She is an extraordinarily funny and brilliant lady, and when I got back I went to see President Sarkozy to try to get him to pull [French oil giant] Total out of Burma. It didn't work. So I thought: perhaps the only force left is people. It comes down to the individual, what they can do.”
Birkin was one of the most powerful sex symbols of post-1968 Paris. Now she is a grandmother. One song, Madame, was written after strangers started calling her that respectful name for an older woman in France. She writes of the realisation: “It broke my heart/ Like a slap in the face.”
“It's about loneliness, really, and this idea of thinking you are still an adolescent because you haven't been aware of the outside of yourself changing. When someone is respectful enough to call you madame it's very kind, but it came as a shock. I'm no longer the pin-up Serge was forever taking pictures of.”
Yet you do feel that there's something of the eternal teenager in Jane Birkin. She was barely out of adolescence, after all, when she fell under the wing of Gainsbourg, and he continues to wield a strong influence on her. Before I leave, conversation inevitably returns to her former lover.
“Not long before he died there was a television special in which all these young children dressed like Serge,” she remembers with a wide, close-to-goofy smile. “They had their little cigarettes and beards and sang: ‘We just came to say we love you.' He started crying because he was someone that didn't love himself, who might have easily died without the knowledge that people in France did love him. Despite everything that I do, I always feel that he's never very far away.”
Enfants d'hiver by Jane Birkin is out on EMI today
Jane Birkin on Serge Gainsbourg and Enfants d'hiver
Jane Birkin, France's favourite English rose, is singing songs that she wrote herself. Serge would approve, she insists
At the Musée de la Musique in Paris, a major exhibition dedicated to the late Serge Gainsbourg has just opened. The ne plus ultra of Gallic style and insouciance, Gainsbourg is a national icon and the exhibition is a fitting tribute to his status. The only problem is, it's a Monday and the Musée de la Musique is closed. Step up, Jane Birkin, honorary Frenchwoman, former lover and muse to Gainsbourg, and wielder of considerable influence in the world of Parisian museum opening times.
“I'm sure they could open it up for you!” she says as she calls up the museum's director. Sure enough, they do. Such is the respect accorded to this English actress and singer in her adopted country - and the level to which Birkin and Gainsbourg are still associated.
“Every day, five times a day, I have taxi drivers talking to me about Serge,” says Birkin, who, with her short, tousled hair and expressive face free of make-up, looks not so different from the gamine that France first fell in love with back in 1969. “But I'm glad because when we were together I never felt he got his due. It was only when we were no longer together that the young people started to discover him. Now French culture is talked of as before and after Serge.”
One gets the impression that there's a before and after Serge with Birkin too. We are in the Japanese-themed bar of an hotel in Saint Germain, a neighbourhood with a blend of bourgeois chic and bohemian charm in which you feel that Birkin, whose accent reveals British officer-class roots despite 40 years in Paris, is very much at home. She is here to talk about Enfants d'hiver, her first album of entirely self-penned material. It uses elegant, understated settings to carry some very personal, intimate lyrics about childhood and growing older, and she's aware of the need to do justice to Gainsbourg's influence.
“I knew from Serge how much artistry it takes to put the maximum emotion into the minimum of words,” says Birkin on the challenge of writing songs after so many decades of singing other people's. “And I was thinking: maybe I should write my own stuff. Maybe if people knew that I was so terribly ordinary underneath my public image, they might feel the words had been written just for them.”
Perhaps remarkably, given that she's 62, Birkin believes that Enfants d'hiver is the first work she's done that isn't trying to please somebody else. “It's about the wildness of family holidays when I was a child, the wildness I've tried to give my own children, and the importance of family. To this day I couldn't imagine not being with my brother and sister and children for Christmas. I'm also not worrying if I still sing in an English accent after being in France for the past 40 years.”
“Do you still have an accent?” I ask.
“Oh God! It's atrocious. Unlike actresses such as Charlotte Rampling and Kristin Scott Thomas, I never learnt French grammar. Getting the word right was enough, and whether it had a ‘le' or a ‘la' before it didn't bother me at all.”
Most of the themes of Enfants d'hiver developed from Boxes (2007), Birkin's debut as a feature-film director. The story of a woman sifting through the memories of her life as she unpacks after moving home, it is clearly autobiographical.
“I was thinking about the nostalgia of childhood, of the majestic figures of your parents in the doorways of your life,” she says. She talks breathlessly as one memory after another tumbles out. “I remember being frightened at a place called Hop Castle,” she says. “Ma drove us in a Triumph Herald, and there were gloomy flowers like foxgloves around the place, and I gasped because we visited a tiny house made of skulls. The whole wonder of it is so exciting. We were winter children. It was the happiest time in my life.”
The personal spills over into the public in Birkin's life. It's hard to avoid, given that two of her daughters, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Lou Doillon, are successful actresses, and that the three men she's had daughters with - the English composer John Barry (father to her first, Kate), Gainsbourg and the film director Jacques Doillon - are all famous too.
Her activism is a product of personal tragedy. In 2001 her brother, the screenwriter and director Andrew Birkin, lost his 20-year-old son Anno in a car crash in Italy. Andrew set up an African charity in his son's honour and this led Jane to reassess her own responsibility as a public figure. A track about the Burmese political prisoner Aung San Suu Kyi on Enfants d'hiver, as well as a high-profile campaign for her release and a plea for governments to pull out investments from Burma, are among the products of this.
“I met Aung San Suu Kyi in Rangoon,” she says. “She is an extraordinarily funny and brilliant lady, and when I got back I went to see President Sarkozy to try to get him to pull [French oil giant] Total out of Burma. It didn't work. So I thought: perhaps the only force left is people. It comes down to the individual, what they can do.”
Birkin was one of the most powerful sex symbols of post-1968 Paris. Now she is a grandmother. One song, Madame, was written after strangers started calling her that respectful name for an older woman in France. She writes of the realisation: “It broke my heart/ Like a slap in the face.”
“It's about loneliness, really, and this idea of thinking you are still an adolescent because you haven't been aware of the outside of yourself changing. When someone is respectful enough to call you madame it's very kind, but it came as a shock. I'm no longer the pin-up Serge was forever taking pictures of.”
Yet you do feel that there's something of the eternal teenager in Jane Birkin. She was barely out of adolescence, after all, when she fell under the wing of Gainsbourg, and he continues to wield a strong influence on her. Before I leave, conversation inevitably returns to her former lover.
“Not long before he died there was a television special in which all these young children dressed like Serge,” she remembers with a wide, close-to-goofy smile. “They had their little cigarettes and beards and sang: ‘We just came to say we love you.' He started crying because he was someone that didn't love himself, who might have easily died without the knowledge that people in France did love him. Despite everything that I do, I always feel that he's never very far away.”
Enfants d'hiver by Jane Birkin is out on EMI today
Glittery_Bug
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/200...in-charlottegainsbourg-loudoillon-aheroiclife
Birkin steps out of Serge's shadow
Gainsbourg's muse finds her own voice as the 80th anniversary of his birth is celebrated
This autumn, almost 30 years after they separated and 17 since he died of a heart attack, France is paying tribute to Gainsbourg on the 80th anniversary of his birth, indulging in a wave of nostalgia for the singer-songwriter who has been elevated to the status of genius in his home country.
At the heart of the reminiscences, inevitably, is Jane Birkin, the cheeky teenager from across the Channel who recorded 'Je T'aime (Moi Mon Plus)', originally written for Brigitte Bardot, and is still, at 61, France's favourite petite anglaise. Birkin features on the walls of the Gainsbourg retrospective exhibition; she has graced the cover of magazines recalling their relationship and has even performed a one-off concert in memory of the man she called her 'Sergio'. But, for the first time there are signs that Birkin has had enough of being just Gainsbourg's girl. After a career dominated by the influence of her charismatic ex-husband, reinterpreting his songs and re-recording his lyrics, she has produced her first album made up entirely of her own music. Enfants d'Hiver (Children of Winter), out tomorrow, is a Serge-free zone with none of the usual covers or tributes. Before a European tour next year, she will perform one of a series of concerts at the soon-to-reopen Paris nightclub Le Palace.
"In the 60s and 70s she was the icon and muse of the greatest musician, the genius really, of France. So for a very long time Jane was always - to many people still is - associated with him," said Eric Deniset, who photographed Birkin for a book of pictures published last month. "But I think that even if she had never met Gainsbourg she would have been recognised as an incredible person for her talents alone. Now she has a new baby - her album - and this is the first time she has written all her own songs. She truly exists in her own right now."
If the album is well received and the tour a sell-out, it will be a new success story for the London-born actress who has been in France since 1968 but whose name has remained synonymous with Gainsbourg, even after his death in 1991. She herself would be the first to admit she has let this happen; she has always stood up for her former lover and seen it as her natural role to act, as the Nouvel Observateur said, as "his muse, his other half, his ray of light". But, gradually, through a mixture of vociferous human rights campaigning, which has taken her to Bosnia, the Palestinian territories and Rwanda, and artistic projects of her own, Birkin has found a voice of her own.
"To begin with, he was like her Pygmalion," said Edwin Roubanovitch, a lecturer at the Cité de la Musique, which is putting on the Gainsbourg 2008 exhibition. "But since then she's done pretty well. The French love her because she is so simple and natural, always smiling. And also because she's so long-lasting, always doing new things. Really, I see her less as an artist than a public figure. Is she a singer, an actress or an activist? I don't know. She's Jane Birkin."
Part of Birkin's special attraction for the French is undoubtedly her Englishness and her marked accent Britannique, which she has retained - many say on purpose. This marketable quality has been quick to catch on among other British actresses following in Birkin's footsteps. Charlotte Rampling won acclaim in two French-language films, Swimming Pool and Heading South, and Kristen Scott-Thomas is said to have given the performance of her career in Philippe Claudel's I've Loved You So Long
Birkin's own family forms an impressive dynasty that includes Kate Barry, her eldest daughter and a respected Paris-based photographer, and award-winning actress Charlotte Gainsbourg, Birkin's only child with her most famous ex-husband. Her youngest daughter, Lou Doillon, is rumoured to have been chosen to play her mother in a biopic of Gainsbourg. It was when Birkin was pregnant with Lou that she left Gainsbourg and moved in with her third husband, Jacques Doillon.
Birkin steps out of Serge's shadow
Gainsbourg's muse finds her own voice as the 80th anniversary of his birth is celebrated
- Lizzy Davies in Paris
- guardian.co.uk, Sunday November 9 2008 00.01 GMT
- The Observer, Sunday November 9 2008
- Article history
This autumn, almost 30 years after they separated and 17 since he died of a heart attack, France is paying tribute to Gainsbourg on the 80th anniversary of his birth, indulging in a wave of nostalgia for the singer-songwriter who has been elevated to the status of genius in his home country.
At the heart of the reminiscences, inevitably, is Jane Birkin, the cheeky teenager from across the Channel who recorded 'Je T'aime (Moi Mon Plus)', originally written for Brigitte Bardot, and is still, at 61, France's favourite petite anglaise. Birkin features on the walls of the Gainsbourg retrospective exhibition; she has graced the cover of magazines recalling their relationship and has even performed a one-off concert in memory of the man she called her 'Sergio'. But, for the first time there are signs that Birkin has had enough of being just Gainsbourg's girl. After a career dominated by the influence of her charismatic ex-husband, reinterpreting his songs and re-recording his lyrics, she has produced her first album made up entirely of her own music. Enfants d'Hiver (Children of Winter), out tomorrow, is a Serge-free zone with none of the usual covers or tributes. Before a European tour next year, she will perform one of a series of concerts at the soon-to-reopen Paris nightclub Le Palace.
"In the 60s and 70s she was the icon and muse of the greatest musician, the genius really, of France. So for a very long time Jane was always - to many people still is - associated with him," said Eric Deniset, who photographed Birkin for a book of pictures published last month. "But I think that even if she had never met Gainsbourg she would have been recognised as an incredible person for her talents alone. Now she has a new baby - her album - and this is the first time she has written all her own songs. She truly exists in her own right now."
If the album is well received and the tour a sell-out, it will be a new success story for the London-born actress who has been in France since 1968 but whose name has remained synonymous with Gainsbourg, even after his death in 1991. She herself would be the first to admit she has let this happen; she has always stood up for her former lover and seen it as her natural role to act, as the Nouvel Observateur said, as "his muse, his other half, his ray of light". But, gradually, through a mixture of vociferous human rights campaigning, which has taken her to Bosnia, the Palestinian territories and Rwanda, and artistic projects of her own, Birkin has found a voice of her own.
"To begin with, he was like her Pygmalion," said Edwin Roubanovitch, a lecturer at the Cité de la Musique, which is putting on the Gainsbourg 2008 exhibition. "But since then she's done pretty well. The French love her because she is so simple and natural, always smiling. And also because she's so long-lasting, always doing new things. Really, I see her less as an artist than a public figure. Is she a singer, an actress or an activist? I don't know. She's Jane Birkin."
Part of Birkin's special attraction for the French is undoubtedly her Englishness and her marked accent Britannique, which she has retained - many say on purpose. This marketable quality has been quick to catch on among other British actresses following in Birkin's footsteps. Charlotte Rampling won acclaim in two French-language films, Swimming Pool and Heading South, and Kristen Scott-Thomas is said to have given the performance of her career in Philippe Claudel's I've Loved You So Long
Birkin's own family forms an impressive dynasty that includes Kate Barry, her eldest daughter and a respected Paris-based photographer, and award-winning actress Charlotte Gainsbourg, Birkin's only child with her most famous ex-husband. Her youngest daughter, Lou Doillon, is rumoured to have been chosen to play her mother in a biopic of Gainsbourg. It was when Birkin was pregnant with Lou that she left Gainsbourg and moved in with her third husband, Jacques Doillon.
Glittery_Bug
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http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article5162240.ece
My Week: Jane Birkin
SOUND AND FURY
In my latest album, Enfants d’Hiver, I’ve laid myself absolutely naked. It’s the frankest thing I’ve done. I just sat down at my kitchen table and spent six days writing down every passion and fury I could feel.
If you read the lyrics, everything is there: the sadness of love affairs ending, the desire of wanting to be loved again and an overwhelming nostalgia for my childhood and our idyllic family holidays on the Isle of Wight.
Writing the album was wonderful but bringing it out has been terrifying. I’ve been at home in Paris this past week promoting it – three radio interviews this morning, a television show this afternoon; non-stop. And at the same time everyone wants to talk to me about my late husband, Serge Gainsbourg, because there’s a huge exhibition about him at the Cité de la Musique.
TIME TO GET AWAY
I would never compare myself to him but I know that when I do concerts, people don’t just come for me. They come because they remember us singing Je t’aime . . . Moi Non Plus – and I owe all that to him. Other people can’t separate me from him but I can, because in the end I lived without him and had a daughter and another life. It was my good luck that he stayed a faithful friend until he died.
I gave the curators of the exhibition all my private letters, but they didn’t want them. They didn’t want anything intimate; they just wanted to concentrate on Serge’s work. I was glad, because they’re recognising that he was one of France’s greatest writers.
People are queuing for two hours to get into the exhibition, hoping for one last glance of him; and this month his face is on the cover of five French magazines. It’s as if he were alive again. It’s all become too much. They’re making a film about him and looking for someone to play me; and someone’s writing a book about me, which I can’t do a thing about.
Taxi drivers turn round and hold my hand and say, “God, I miss him.” Maybe I should buy a car and write on it, “I miss him, too.”
My association with him is rather like having lived with Baudelaire. I don’t feel it’s time to move on – I wouldn’t want to. But it’s time to move out of France for a year or so. I just can’t take any more questions. For most of next year I’ll be touring, so I’ll be in hotel rooms away from it all. I’d like to spend some time in England, too, but I always avoid Chelsea where my parents lived. It’s as if there are bodies there, laid out in chalk. I would go back only if I could see my mother in the doorway again and hold my father’s hand. They gave me such a blissful childhood.
When we were on the Isle of Wight we were allowed to be wild, like savages. We’d go down to the beach on our bicycles at 6am and nobody minded if we didn’t come back until it was dark.
It was wonderful; nothing was ever as good until I had children of my own. One of the biggest joys in my life now is taking my grandchildren and the bulldog to Brittany for the weekend.
SPLENDID WITHOUT SPECS
People ask me if I feel more English or more French but I couldn’t care less. I suppose when I’m in France I try to be English; and when I’m in England I try to be French. I can feel at home anywhere – it’s something I’ve inherited from my parents.
Maybe it’s an English thing but I spend as little time as possible on my appearance. I’ve never washed my hair much and now I’ve cut it as short as a boy’s so I needn’t do anything with it at all.
The only thing I take care of is my diet. At the moment I’ve been told to eat black bread and olive oil and to drink green tea.
When I see myself in the mirror I think I look splendid – until I put my specs on. Then all the ravages of time appear.
FAITHFULL FRIEND
I avoid loneliness by being jolly careful not to be alone. Last night I was doing a radio show until 10pm, then I had dinner with Marianne Faithfull, who was with someone who had known Kafka.
And then tomorrow I’m going on a march for Aung San Suu Kyi. There’s a petition on my website demanding her release. I’m as much an activist as a singer.
My mother had a great intellectual range and curiosity and I’ve always strived to live up to it, to be more like her. It’s one of the things that has guided me. I have regrets but I don’t think it’s worth looking back. My greatest chance in life was never to have had much going for me. If I’d had amazing beauty and talent I wouldn’t have tried.
My Week: Jane Birkin
SOUND AND FURY
In my latest album, Enfants d’Hiver, I’ve laid myself absolutely naked. It’s the frankest thing I’ve done. I just sat down at my kitchen table and spent six days writing down every passion and fury I could feel.
If you read the lyrics, everything is there: the sadness of love affairs ending, the desire of wanting to be loved again and an overwhelming nostalgia for my childhood and our idyllic family holidays on the Isle of Wight.
Writing the album was wonderful but bringing it out has been terrifying. I’ve been at home in Paris this past week promoting it – three radio interviews this morning, a television show this afternoon; non-stop. And at the same time everyone wants to talk to me about my late husband, Serge Gainsbourg, because there’s a huge exhibition about him at the Cité de la Musique.
TIME TO GET AWAY
I would never compare myself to him but I know that when I do concerts, people don’t just come for me. They come because they remember us singing Je t’aime . . . Moi Non Plus – and I owe all that to him. Other people can’t separate me from him but I can, because in the end I lived without him and had a daughter and another life. It was my good luck that he stayed a faithful friend until he died.
I gave the curators of the exhibition all my private letters, but they didn’t want them. They didn’t want anything intimate; they just wanted to concentrate on Serge’s work. I was glad, because they’re recognising that he was one of France’s greatest writers.
People are queuing for two hours to get into the exhibition, hoping for one last glance of him; and this month his face is on the cover of five French magazines. It’s as if he were alive again. It’s all become too much. They’re making a film about him and looking for someone to play me; and someone’s writing a book about me, which I can’t do a thing about.
Taxi drivers turn round and hold my hand and say, “God, I miss him.” Maybe I should buy a car and write on it, “I miss him, too.”
My association with him is rather like having lived with Baudelaire. I don’t feel it’s time to move on – I wouldn’t want to. But it’s time to move out of France for a year or so. I just can’t take any more questions. For most of next year I’ll be touring, so I’ll be in hotel rooms away from it all. I’d like to spend some time in England, too, but I always avoid Chelsea where my parents lived. It’s as if there are bodies there, laid out in chalk. I would go back only if I could see my mother in the doorway again and hold my father’s hand. They gave me such a blissful childhood.
When we were on the Isle of Wight we were allowed to be wild, like savages. We’d go down to the beach on our bicycles at 6am and nobody minded if we didn’t come back until it was dark.
It was wonderful; nothing was ever as good until I had children of my own. One of the biggest joys in my life now is taking my grandchildren and the bulldog to Brittany for the weekend.
SPLENDID WITHOUT SPECS
People ask me if I feel more English or more French but I couldn’t care less. I suppose when I’m in France I try to be English; and when I’m in England I try to be French. I can feel at home anywhere – it’s something I’ve inherited from my parents.
Maybe it’s an English thing but I spend as little time as possible on my appearance. I’ve never washed my hair much and now I’ve cut it as short as a boy’s so I needn’t do anything with it at all.
The only thing I take care of is my diet. At the moment I’ve been told to eat black bread and olive oil and to drink green tea.
When I see myself in the mirror I think I look splendid – until I put my specs on. Then all the ravages of time appear.
FAITHFULL FRIEND
I avoid loneliness by being jolly careful not to be alone. Last night I was doing a radio show until 10pm, then I had dinner with Marianne Faithfull, who was with someone who had known Kafka.
And then tomorrow I’m going on a march for Aung San Suu Kyi. There’s a petition on my website demanding her release. I’m as much an activist as a singer.
My mother had a great intellectual range and curiosity and I’ve always strived to live up to it, to be more like her. It’s one of the things that has guided me. I have regrets but I don’t think it’s worth looking back. My greatest chance in life was never to have had much going for me. If I’d had amazing beauty and talent I wouldn’t have tried.
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Wow, Lemeray! So many pictures I haven't seen before. Jane never fails to inspire me.
paper.flowers
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i adore this woman ! it is crazy how much kate looks like her in this pic..
Jane's life just seems so peacufll, it inspires me A LOT!!! thanks for this topic this is just...marvelous!!
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rox_yr_sox
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From Russh Magazine Australia Jan/Feb 07
my scan
my scan
^^ Then I trust you are comfortable wearing a skirt that is 14" long...
haha very funny
If I can find one like her orange one she wore with a white tank and belt i'll be fine
I was more in a hair rut.
I'm getting my fringe back asap
Glittery_Bug
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http://www.newstatesman.com/200503140038
Encounter - Jane Birkin is awe-inspiring compared to today's Botox-riddled sex goddesses, finds Rachel Halliburton
Jane Birkin - Sixties sex symbol, chanteuse, actress and, latterly, French icon - confesses early in my interview with her that she is jealous of her bulldog Dora. Though both are international travellers, Dora has one distinct advantage: rather than being plagued by a passport, she is blessed with a small injected microchip. "I would love to have a chip," Birkin declares, "I wish they'd wham one in straight away. I'm always losing passports, so I'm constantly in that awful queue when you think, 'Oh no, not at my age, not again.'"
It is difficult to believe that, at 58, Birkin thinks anything is inappropriate for her age. It was 1966 when she made cinematic history by appearing as a full-frontal nude in Michelangelo Antonioni's Blowup - "I only did it for a dare" - and 1969 when she shocked the world by recording the orgasmic "Je t'aime" with her lover Serge Gainsbourg. Almost four decades later, she retains her gamine figure, while her dark hair is swept up chaotically around an animated face, dominated by her famous gap-toothed smile. When we meet at the Sloane Hotel in Chelsea, she reveals that she has also kept her talent for upsetting world leaders. In 1969, it was the Pope; now it is the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, who recently banned her from performing in Russia "because I stuck up for the Chechnyans".
For someone who has whipped up so much controversy in her life, Birkin seems strikingly unworldly. Her sentences tumble out in long streams of consciousness, and she is happy to come across as terminally distracted. She tells a story about her portrayal of a countess - in a drama by Marivaux - who falls in love with a girl dressed up as a boy. "The director made me put my hands right against the actress's chest to show how in love I was with the character she was playing, so the actress said: 'Don't you think Jane will notice that I've got a pair of breasts?' And he said: 'To be honest, I don't think Jane will notice anything.'"
Yet Birkin notices a lot more than she pretends. Her hectic work schedule is testimony to the grit that is hidden beneath her eccentric exterior. In the four decades since her first cinematic appearance, she has notched up more than 72 films (some terrible, some impressive); her singing career continues to take her all over the world; and after being courted by more than one director, she is in Britain to play Gertrude in Hamlet. "I've been asked to play Gertrude three times in the past year," she says. "This time I knew that the director, Rupert Goold, had done a production of Paradise Lost, which I'm told was extraordinary - and fallen angels is one of my favourite themes."
Gainsbourg, who died in 1991, haunts the conversation. Birkin was briefly married to the prolific film composer John Barry in the Sixties, and left Gainsbourg for the film director Jacques Doillon in 1981, but it is the iconoclastic French musician who continues to shape her life. For her current tour as a singer, she is performing some of Gainsbourg's songs scored to Arab-influenced music, and even though none of them is causing as much outrage as "Je t'aime" or "Lemon Incest" (which he infamously performed with their daughter Charlotte), she has received much acclaim for the way she has sustained his legacy.
Birkin compares her former lover to the critic, experimental poet and p*rn*gr*ph*c novelist Guillaume Apollinaire, and, more surprisingly, to the Trojan hero Hector. "When I played Andromache [at the National Theatre in Women of Troy in 1995], there was my hero with all his armour and stuff behind me - it was just like my baggage with Serge."
Her appearance in Women of Troy led to an unexpected odyssey. Fascinated by the pronouncement of the director Annie Castledine that, in times of war, "when there's nothing left there are words", she volunteered to go to the Andre Malraux Cultural Centre in Sarajevo to take books to people living there under siege. "I also asked my mother, 'What did you take when your apartment was bombed in the Second World War?' - and she answered 'Schiaparelli Shocking perfume. When you're losing everything, it's what makes you feel good that counts.'
"So I went down the rue de Passy [in Paris] with my daughter Lou and chose a load of silk underclothes for the university students, and then I went to Guerlain and picked up all the lipstick, because I thought, 'They used to buy their shoes in Italy, probably Venice, so they won't want any cheapo things.' And Ma had been completely right - the shrieks of joy when we went to this ghost town and I pulled the frivolous things out of my backpack and flung them all on to the ground."
Birkin's mother, Judy Campbell, a former muse to Noel Coward, died last year. All the family were around her, including Birkin's three daughters, Kate Barry, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Lou Doillon, and their children. "She put on pearls and silk pyjamas because her grandson was coming and they opened champagne, and when the cork went off she said: 'I hope you haven't hit one of my nurses.'"
Birkin's mother was performing in the theatre only months before she died and, on current evidence, it seems that Birkin will continue to work for as long as she has the power to breathe. When she finishes Hamlet, she will be making a film about Robert Louis Stevenson - "I'm playing his wife" - and she has Electra lined up at the National Theatre in France. She finds it amusing and slightly exasperating that, despite all the work she still does, people seem most interested - after asking about Gainsbourg - in the famous bag that Hermes designed in her honour after she accidentally dropped her possessions over the designer when they sat next to each other on a plane.
"People always want to talk about it," she laughs. "I just don't understand. It can get a bit much" - and her eyes flash - "to be upstaged by a bag."
Encounter - Jane Birkin is awe-inspiring compared to today's Botox-riddled sex goddesses, finds Rachel Halliburton
Jane Birkin - Sixties sex symbol, chanteuse, actress and, latterly, French icon - confesses early in my interview with her that she is jealous of her bulldog Dora. Though both are international travellers, Dora has one distinct advantage: rather than being plagued by a passport, she is blessed with a small injected microchip. "I would love to have a chip," Birkin declares, "I wish they'd wham one in straight away. I'm always losing passports, so I'm constantly in that awful queue when you think, 'Oh no, not at my age, not again.'"
It is difficult to believe that, at 58, Birkin thinks anything is inappropriate for her age. It was 1966 when she made cinematic history by appearing as a full-frontal nude in Michelangelo Antonioni's Blowup - "I only did it for a dare" - and 1969 when she shocked the world by recording the orgasmic "Je t'aime" with her lover Serge Gainsbourg. Almost four decades later, she retains her gamine figure, while her dark hair is swept up chaotically around an animated face, dominated by her famous gap-toothed smile. When we meet at the Sloane Hotel in Chelsea, she reveals that she has also kept her talent for upsetting world leaders. In 1969, it was the Pope; now it is the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, who recently banned her from performing in Russia "because I stuck up for the Chechnyans".
For someone who has whipped up so much controversy in her life, Birkin seems strikingly unworldly. Her sentences tumble out in long streams of consciousness, and she is happy to come across as terminally distracted. She tells a story about her portrayal of a countess - in a drama by Marivaux - who falls in love with a girl dressed up as a boy. "The director made me put my hands right against the actress's chest to show how in love I was with the character she was playing, so the actress said: 'Don't you think Jane will notice that I've got a pair of breasts?' And he said: 'To be honest, I don't think Jane will notice anything.'"
Yet Birkin notices a lot more than she pretends. Her hectic work schedule is testimony to the grit that is hidden beneath her eccentric exterior. In the four decades since her first cinematic appearance, she has notched up more than 72 films (some terrible, some impressive); her singing career continues to take her all over the world; and after being courted by more than one director, she is in Britain to play Gertrude in Hamlet. "I've been asked to play Gertrude three times in the past year," she says. "This time I knew that the director, Rupert Goold, had done a production of Paradise Lost, which I'm told was extraordinary - and fallen angels is one of my favourite themes."
Gainsbourg, who died in 1991, haunts the conversation. Birkin was briefly married to the prolific film composer John Barry in the Sixties, and left Gainsbourg for the film director Jacques Doillon in 1981, but it is the iconoclastic French musician who continues to shape her life. For her current tour as a singer, she is performing some of Gainsbourg's songs scored to Arab-influenced music, and even though none of them is causing as much outrage as "Je t'aime" or "Lemon Incest" (which he infamously performed with their daughter Charlotte), she has received much acclaim for the way she has sustained his legacy.
Birkin compares her former lover to the critic, experimental poet and p*rn*gr*ph*c novelist Guillaume Apollinaire, and, more surprisingly, to the Trojan hero Hector. "When I played Andromache [at the National Theatre in Women of Troy in 1995], there was my hero with all his armour and stuff behind me - it was just like my baggage with Serge."
Her appearance in Women of Troy led to an unexpected odyssey. Fascinated by the pronouncement of the director Annie Castledine that, in times of war, "when there's nothing left there are words", she volunteered to go to the Andre Malraux Cultural Centre in Sarajevo to take books to people living there under siege. "I also asked my mother, 'What did you take when your apartment was bombed in the Second World War?' - and she answered 'Schiaparelli Shocking perfume. When you're losing everything, it's what makes you feel good that counts.'
"So I went down the rue de Passy [in Paris] with my daughter Lou and chose a load of silk underclothes for the university students, and then I went to Guerlain and picked up all the lipstick, because I thought, 'They used to buy their shoes in Italy, probably Venice, so they won't want any cheapo things.' And Ma had been completely right - the shrieks of joy when we went to this ghost town and I pulled the frivolous things out of my backpack and flung them all on to the ground."
Birkin's mother, Judy Campbell, a former muse to Noel Coward, died last year. All the family were around her, including Birkin's three daughters, Kate Barry, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Lou Doillon, and their children. "She put on pearls and silk pyjamas because her grandson was coming and they opened champagne, and when the cork went off she said: 'I hope you haven't hit one of my nurses.'"
Birkin's mother was performing in the theatre only months before she died and, on current evidence, it seems that Birkin will continue to work for as long as she has the power to breathe. When she finishes Hamlet, she will be making a film about Robert Louis Stevenson - "I'm playing his wife" - and she has Electra lined up at the National Theatre in France. She finds it amusing and slightly exasperating that, despite all the work she still does, people seem most interested - after asking about Gainsbourg - in the famous bag that Hermes designed in her honour after she accidentally dropped her possessions over the designer when they sat next to each other on a plane.
"People always want to talk about it," she laughs. "I just don't understand. It can get a bit much" - and her eyes flash - "to be upstaged by a bag."
