Jane Birkin

[lemeray]

 

[Glittery_Bug]

Wow, thank you so much! These are all incredible!

 

[*ana*]

amazing, lemeray. thank you.

 

[lemeray]

 

[lemeray]

 

[lemeray]

WENN/SIPA

 

[StellaMare]

Lemeray! You are too great
It's like Christmas in here..

 

[jessi_k75]

Thanks !!!!!!!!!

 

[jessi_k75]

Once again Lemeray you're incredible !!!
Thank you so much for making this thread so full of treasures !!!

 

[Carrme]

very inspiring

 

[Diorette]

Wow! Wonderful photos!



Thanks lemeray.

 

[paper.flowers]

a thousand thanks Lemeray you re the best it is just so wonderfull! all those pictures made me SO happy

 

[Zkunis]

Thanks for all those amazing pics lemeray!!!

 

[anniehall]

Thanks!

 

[MARLOWE TIGER]

Thank you Lemeray

 

[Glittery_Bug]

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-e...in-whatever-happened-to-jane-baby-568067.html

Jane Birkin: Whatever happened to Jane, baby?

In Britain, Jane Birkin is remembered only for "Je t'aime...", her notorious duet with Serge Gainsbourg, but in France, she's an icon of Anglo-Gallic cool and chic motherhood. Always restless, she tells Nick Duerden, she's decided to sing all over again
Monday, 29 March 2004


When Jane Birkin was just 17 years old, she had already settled into a rather orderly life for someone who considered herself the very definition of bohemian chic. The girl born to artistic, aristocratic parents - her father a naval officer-turned-painter, her mother an actress - had married the James Bond composer John Barry and was carrying his child. But for someone who had already courted infamy by appearing in Antonioni's 1966 film Blow Up as the first full-frontal nude to ever grace a British cinema screen, this was clearly not part of the script. And so when Time magazine described her as little more than her husband's attractive accessory - "[his] E-Type wife to go along with his E-Type Jag" - she took the criticism to heart.
"I suppose it did offend me, yes," she says now, "but I really didn't know what to do with my life. I often thought that if anybody had wanted to take me off into the country and look after me forever, then I would have been delighted. But," she adds, and here her gaze drifts on to an invisible point on the wall, "things were not to turn out that way, were they?"
No, they weren't. Shortly after, she landed a small part in an awful French movie called Slogan, and decamped to Paris for its filming. By now she was 20 years old and Paris, a city that, in 1968, was enveloped in bohemia, appealed to her greatly. She was introduced to a locally famous Frenchman who was ugly, unshaven, a sometime actor, singer, director and novelist, and a good 20 years her senior. Birkin did what beautiful women so often do with seemingly inappropriate men: she fell in love with him.
Serge Gainsbourg had already spent several years challenging all manner of French morals and offending the establishment. He had just written a song about sex, "Je T'aime... Moi Non Plus", for his then-girlfriend, Brigitte Bardot, but their relationship was suffering for many reasons - one of them, purportedly, due to his claimed phobia of breasts. He promptly took up with the under-endowed Birkin, claiming her his ideal woman. He presented her with the song to sing, which she did lustily, faking the scripted orgasm until it sounded anything but scripted. The result incensed the Vatican and was banned by the BBC. Consequently, it reached Number 1 in the UK, and made her notorious for eternity.
"I know exactly what the music will be when I exit this world, and I've come to accept that. After all, I am the woman who did the rude song." She sighs theatrically. "It's all the British seem to remember me for, which is curious when you consider that I've done so much more since. But there you go. Actually," and here comes a smile, "I rather like the notoriety."
While she does indeed remain "the woman who did the rude song" in her native UK, Jane Birkin has been revered as an icon in France, her adopted home, for close to four decades now. Next birthday, she'll be 58, and is busier than ever. Right now, she is promoting a new album of duets, Rendez-Vous, and it is headline news here in Paris, where we meet at the TV5 Studios. She will promote the album right across the world, chiefly, she says, "because the suitcase element of life is very attractive to me. I've developed a real craving for travel of late."
She goes on to illustrate this in bizarrely eccentric, but typically Birkinesque, fashion. While on the surface she appears to personify grace and elegance - handsome in tight blue jeans and V-neck cashmere sweater, a figure Kate Moss will one day come to envy, and tumbledown hair - the notion is expelled the moment she talks. It is quite remarkable to witness the ebb and flow of it all, words delivered with a barmy energy, as if the delivery of one freewheeling sentence encourages the arrival of the next, complete with unsignposted tangents, and occasional lapses into French. She starts by recalling the places she has visited recently: Vietnam, Tel Aviv, Bethlehem, and "the place where they filmed the King of Siam."
Bangkok?
"Bangkok! That's it. Marvellous place."
And then come those tangents. First, the plays of Chekhov, then Gainsbourg, whom she describes as "the love of my life". Next, blood tests for dogs, her recent appearance on the Graham Norton show, and how she loves to receive standing ovations. She doesn't stop talking for a full 15 minutes, and barely pauses for breath. Unsurprisingly, she has lost me completely. And then, without forewarning, she comes back down to earth.
"...With a little bit of luck, anyway, touch wood," she says, now suddenly alert. She casts an eye around the room, because when she says "touch wood", she means it literally. This proves difficult, given that the table is glass, the chairs leather and the carpet is, well, some kind of carpety fabric.
"The skirting board!"
And now she is on her hands and knees, touching wood, palpably relieved.
A moment later, though, and she has reverted back to silent Style Icon, draped casually in her chair, right leg crossed over left, exuding studied poise. There is a zealous glint in her eye, and a smile is gradually melting across her face like butter. She asks me where we were in our conversation, and momentarily I am speechless, because, of course, I haven't the faintest idea.
Mercifully, her dog Dora, an exceptionally ugly bulldog with the mother of all underbites, then causes a distraction by farting. Birkin pinches her nose between forefinger and thumb, and loudly castigates it. Dora, unimpressed by the fuss, waddles over to the far corner of the room where she can fart in peace.
"That dog has terrible wind," she says. "I do apologise."
Rendez-Vous, Jane Birkin's new album, is a strange, bewitching and beguiling record that features 16 collaborations with, amongst others, Bryan Ferry, Portishead's Beth Gibbons and Brian Molko of Placebo. Sung in both French and English (and, in one instance, Japanese), the idea for the album came from her record company boss, whom Birkin had approached, cautiously, a year earlier when looking for a new recording deal.
"I said to him, 'Do you think I am worth anything in today's currency?' I told him to think of me not as a woman, but as a carpet. An old carpet, certainly, but one that was once a very good carpet. Some people prefer old carpets; they think young ones are merely flash. OK, so maybe this one might have a few cigarette holes and wine stains, but it could still potentially be quite marvellous. He looked at me, and do you know what he did? He smiled! He smiled and said that there were a great many things to be had from an old carpet."
She enjoyed recording the album immensely, and was fascinated particularly by Molko and Gibbons, both of whom she wanted to mother.
"Brian was so very lovely, sweet, intelligent, bilingual, bisexual, and very self-deprecating, and Beth... Well, Beth completely intrigued me. Such beautiful hair, sort of red and pinky, almost Venetian, and certainly not out of a bottle. I made a point of telling her that. She's very eager for information, Beth, but imparts almost nothing of herself. I know that she lives near Cornwall, and that's about it, and yet she managed to get my whole life story out of me... Did you know that she wears green shoes?
I do now.
The album's artwork - a lithe Birkin strewn in black-and-white across a succession of school chairs - was the concept of her eldest, photographer daughter Kate, who is now 37. When discussing her offspring, Birkin, who is already prone to verbal flourishes, becomes positively rhapsodic. She has three daughters, one each respectively from John Barry, Serge Gainsbourg and the film director Jacques Doillon. Kate, she says, founded a retreat for alcoholics in France when she was just 19, and spent the next 10 years "saving more people than I've had hot breakfasts". Charlotte, 32, is an actress of considerable repute and is, in her mother's eyes, "an uncut diamond with unlimited acting ability. I thought she was terribly underused in 21 Grams." And 20 year-old model-cum-actress Lou?
"Lou is something special," she says. "At the age of 12, she told me she was going to become a nude model. She said to me this: 'Mother, I know that all I've got going for me is my beauty and, yes, I know it's ephemeral, but I'm going to make the most out of it.'" Her mother tried to talk her out of it, saying that it would ultimately hold her back in her career, her life. But when Lou responded that Birkin herself had done likewise at a young age, Mum had to concede the point, and is now full of respect. "She wasn't very good at school, you see, but she is so very intelligent; right now, she is reading everything by Samuel Pepys and Somerset Maugham. She's a wonderful actress, as well, and she recently turned down the opportunity of playing Ophelia, because she claimed the part offered her nothing."
The proud mother recently recounted this to the actor John Malkovich. Malkovich saw the daughter's point of view. "She should be playing Hamlet," he told her.
Two years ago, Birkin was awarded an OBE for services to Anglo-French relations. For someone who claims to have had little drive in life, the accolade came as something of a surprise. But it shouldn't, because during her 37 years in France (she maintains properties in Paris and Brest), she has appeared in more than 50 films, countless plays, has spearheaded humanitarian projects in Sarajevo, and continues to sing the songs Gainsbourg wrote for her. Although their decade-long relationship was a tempestuous one, punctuated by raging arguments that once prompted Birkin, a non-swimmer, to throw herself into the Seine, they remained close friends after splitting in 1983 until his death from a heart attack eight years later. She is overjoyed that his work is now reaching a new audience, something she puts down, bizarrely, to the Eurostar, which she insists brings Britain and France together in more ways than one.
"Serge adored Britain," she says, "but he could never understand why they preferred Sasha Distel to him. That he is now proving more enduring would be a great comfort to him, I'm sure. I owe him so much of my life, you know. As a girl, I thought I wanted to become a James Bond girl but that," she says, looking down at her lack of an Ursula Andres bosom, "was never going to happen. I think people have had ambition for me, which is very kind of them. Serge had it, and the French people themselves have sustained me for such a long time. I'm awfully grateful to them."
And she shows no sign of slowing down, either. She is always working, forever planning new projects across all media. I ask her if she fears the ageing process. Her answer is delightfully random.
"I did think the prospect of age would be frightening," she concedes, "but, do you know, is really isn't at all. And that's because there is still so much to do, to learn. I love history, for example. I'm currently reading all about Mary, Queen of Scots, and it's completely fascinating. I want to travel to places like Siberia. I love visiting my children. I've just read The Quiet American, because I was in Vietnam recently. And I've seen Chechnyan children dance." Her eyes mist over. "Every day is filled with so many opportunities, so many discoveries. I enjoy life immensely."
On the third finger of her left hand, Jane Birkin wears what looks like a silver wedding band. In fact, it's a signet ring turned upside down. I mention it, and she takes it off to appraise.
"No, I'm not in a relationship at the moment," she says, without apparent sadness. "Unless you count the dog, of course, and I'd really rather you didn't."
She smiles, then laughs and claps her hands loudly, looking positively teenage.
'Rendez-Vous' is out now on Capitol

 

[Glittery_Bug]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/travel/destinations/france/article5250721.ece

The insiders' guide to bohemian Paris

Jane Birkin, Camille and more famous residents on the coolest places to hang-out in Paris


Paris is the most beautiful city in Europe – but its headline attractions can leave you feeling a little short-changed.
The Eiffel Tower is riveting to look at, but frequently overrun with visitors. The Champs Elysées has sold out to a less than paradisal parade of international brands. And the steps of the Sacré Coeur have been invaded by partying teenagers.
Some of the heart seems to have gone out of it.
The bohemian soul of the city survives, however: you just need a little help finding it. It’s there in the pavement cafes and jazz bars, the hidden gardens and backstreet bistros of neighbourhood Paris. It’s there in the labyrinthine flea markets of Saint-Ouen, the basement theatres of the Marais and the piled-high grocery stands of the Marché des Enfants Rouges.

If you know where to look, even Montmartre still has its authentic painters’ studios and art-house cinemas. To excavate this real Paris, you’ll need a helping hand. We asked five notable locals, well placed for a neighbourhood steer, for their favourite Parisian tip-offs.
JANE BIRKIN
Singer, actress, film director and “most famous Englishwoman in France”, Birkin has lived in Paris since 1969. Her new album is Enfants d’Hiver My secret place for contemplation, the place to escape the hustle and sample a scene that hasn’t changed since the 1920s, is theParis Mosque. It’s easy to find, within walking distance of Notre Dame, where I take my grandchildren to play swordfights in the cathedral tower and look at the gargoyles.
Once you step inside the mosque, the modern city closes up behind you. It is arranged around a fairy-tale courtyard and has a tearoom, where you can have mint tea and sticky oriental cakes. I often go for a scrub and rub in the hammam there. It has a series of rooms, cold and hot, and separate sessions are timetabled for men and women – you can even take children in. You sort of loll around and take refreshment.
The ladies are so kind; they’ll take all the skin off your body with black soap. You can keep your knickers on if you really want to. There’s a lovely, old-fashioned feel about it, like something from a Delacroix painting. The mosque even has a little boutique where you can buy all the lovely booty you forgot to pick up in Morocco the last time you were there.
Just across the road is theJardin des Plantes– rather like the museum at the Royal Geographical Society in Kensington, but set in a huge park. I enjoy wandering through the beautiful 19th-century glasshouses, which are full of tropical plants; you can be Tarzan in there. And there’s a charming zoo, founded in 1795 with animals from the Royal Menagerie, at Versailles. Every summer, I go and sketch the newborn orang-utans.
Details:Le Mosquée de Paris (www.mosquee-de-paris.net) offers tours daily except Friday (£2); hammam sessions start at £12 (www.la-mosquee.com). Admission to the menagerie at the Jardin des Plantes (www.mnhn.fr) costs £6.

 

[MissMagAddict]

Interview with Jane Birkin: The Perennial Ingenue
by Katya Foreman
Posted Monday January 05, 2009

PARIS — Perennial ingenue Jane Birkin’s singing career kicked off in 1969 with “Je T’aime…Moi Non Plus,” the scandalously erotic love song she recorded with the late musician and actor Serge Gainsbourg, with whom she had a famously volatile 13-year relationship. Since then, Birkin’s singing efforts, which encompass some 16 albums, have been inextricably linked to Gainsbourg. But now, with her first completely self-penned album, “Enfants d’Hiver,” the 62-year-old singer and actress journeyed back to her childhood in England, where she grew up the daughter of David Birkin, an aristocratic Royal Navy commander, and Judy Campbell, a musical actress. The album is due out in the U.S. on Wednesday, and Birkin will be performing at Carnegie Hall this fall.

Here, Birkin — the mother of Kate Barry, Lou Doillon and Charlotte Gainsbourg — discusses her family, touring and being a perpetual tomboy.

WWD: The album cover for “Enfants d’Hiver” features you as a tomboy child clutching an apple. When and where was it taken?
Jane Birkin: In the Isle of Wight, where we would spend our summers. I think I was 11 or 12. We had a cottage there. They were sublime times for me.…I wanted to be like my brother Andrew and was always borrowing his clothes. Now I can cut my hair off and be roughly the same. The bits in between, the films, my time with Serge [Gainsbourg], everybody knows about that, but they don’t know about my childhood. It’s a country you can never go back to.

WWD: Where did you write the album?
J.B.: In Brittany and on the road during my “Arabesque” tour that stretched over seven years in 38 countries. I wrote on sick bags in airplanes or on menus in hotel rooms at night.

WWD: Was Serge Gainsbourg on your mind when you recorded this album?
J.B.: This is more about [memories of] my father, running up the steps, four by four, into his arms, and the next time I go up he has marble feet and he’s dead in bed and I didn’t dare kiss his feet.

WWD: Tell us about the track “Madame.”
J.B.: It’s about the surprise of being called “Madame” when you think you’re an old teenager — that idea of waking up in the morning and going into the bathroom to splash water on your face and you look into the looking glass without your specs on and you look just the same. [Then] you put on your glasses and you could scream. But without the glasses the feelings are the same. It’s peculiar to change into something else.

WWD: You recently performed a concert on the stairs of the renovated Hermès flagship in Paris. As a human rights activist, do you use your connection with the house to aid your humanitarian interests?
J.B.: Are you kidding? [In 2007] I auctioned the original Birkin bag that I designed for nearly 100,000 British pounds for the human rights organization FIDH. After that, I got my lawyer to negotiate with them to make a yearly donation to a charity, even after my death. I’ve asked them to double
that now.
WWD: A V-neck sweater and jeans is your signature look. Do you have a wardrobe of ballgowns at home that you secretly like to dress up in?
J.B.: Not at all. My thing is cashmere jerseys. I’m always peeking in [my daughters’] collars to see where they’ve bought their cashmere from. I just did a TV show a couple of days ago with [opera singer] Roberto Ayala where we sang “Je Suis Venu Te Dire Que Je M’en Vais.” I had to make a tiny bit of effort. I’d bought a secondhand YSL suit for a cocktail in Buenos Aires and wore it with stockings and high heels and a camisole from Sabbia Rosa, where I used to buy my lingerie when I was younger. People were amazed; they’re so used to seeing me in jeans. Then I threw it all off and got changed. I couldn’t wait to get my shoes off, and the skirt was too tight. I’d rather be dressed as a man, and Lou [Doillon] had found these baggy men’s pants [by John Varvatos] for me in New York. As soon as I’m in boys’ things I feel like I’m 12 again. I’ll go on tour in a white shirt and waistcoat. Lou is my costume designer; she has all the good ideas.

WWD: Tell us about your cashmere designs for Lutz & Patmos.
J.B.: I just designed a low-cut jersey in boring colors like taupe and gray or faded blue. I love it when you don’t have to fight against color: Beige is the skin, taupe is the hair and blue is the eyes. I like wearing very, very old things. I had a pair of old Ugg boots, the real ones from Australia, that I wore so much my toes came out of the end and my feet were covered in ink. They looked all sooty, as if I’d been cleaning the chimney.

WWD: You are the mother of a pretty impressive brood.
J.B.: Yes, they have managed, quite beautifully, to become their own person. Lou is the greatest for wanting to share things and has her line with Lee Cooper; Charlotte just did the film [“Antichrist”] with Lars von Trier and is mixing an album with Beck in New York, so I don’t have to worry there, and Kate is one of France’s greatest female photographers. She’s certainly the only one I want to be photographed by. [The song] “Pourquoi” was for Charlotte and “A La Grâce De Toi” was for Kate.

WWD: What’s up next for you?
J.B.: “[A vacation] with my family on the beach in Wales.

Source | Women's Wear Daily

 

[Glittery_Bug]

Nothing ground-breaking, but I guess it fits here...

http://www.timeout.com/london/features/1861.html

• Serena Rees on Jane Birkin
• Interview: Kate Riordan
  
  
  Posted: Fri Aug 18 2006
  
• Serena Rees is co-founder of Agent Provocateur, the luxury British lingerie brand, which launched in 1994 and whose mission statement was to take the smut and prudery out of the British attitude to sex
  
  In choosing my favourite Londoner, I wanted to pick a woman. And I wanted to pick a woman who I thought was special. From what I’ve experienced of Jane Birkin, that just shines through. In interviews – or if you’ve been to see her in concert – you get that from her. It’s to do with her passion and honesty and her sexuality and sensuality. She never dates. And I suppose that’s what I promote in my work, that celebration of femininity: she’s a wonderful female icon.She was born in London in 1946 to Major David Birkin, who was in the Royal Navy, and actress and singer Judy Campbell, who had appeared in Noël Coward films. She had a pretty conventional childhood and went to boarding school. That all changed when she reached her late teens and moved to Chelsea, where she still returns when she visits London from her French home in St Germain. My own first flat was in the King’s Road in Chelsea too. When she lived there, that was her bohemian, artistic period, when she was discovering who she was.
  
  I first became aware of her from pictures taken in the ’60s which I saw in my early teens. I was too young to know of her at the time: I was born in her heyday, in 1968, the year she first went to France. And the year before the controversial film ‘Blowup’ was made, where she did the first full-frontal nude scene shown in Britain. Later she played Brigitte Bardot’s lover in ‘Don Juan (Or If Don Juan Were a Woman)’ – which is mad!
  
  I’m not nuts about the whole ’60s thing but I love all those pictures and images of London at the time. We’ve all seen them. They just all look like they’re having a great time. I’m passionate about London and I’m a Londoner myself. I travel a lot and you go to these different cities and fantasise about living somewhere else, but actually I know I could never live anywhere but London. So I love those iconic pictures.
  
  She got married very young to John Barry, the composer famous for writing the James Bond theme music and, in 1967, she had the first of her three daughters, Kate Barry. When the marriage failed, she went off to Paris to audition for a film called ‘Slogan’. This is where she met him – Serge Gainsbourg. She went along, didn’t speak French or anything, and found herself working with Serge. I love that slight dippiness that says: I can do anything, let’s give it a go, even if I don’t speak the language. Of course she got the part, opposite Serge, though I don’t think they got on too well at first. He was quite a difficult person and he’d had this long string of lovers; he’d even had a fling with Brigitte Bardot before Jane. But then they went out for dinner one night and before you knew it they were having this passionate affair. Basically that turned into a really important partnership, not only for them, or even for French cultural history, but worldwide. In 1969 they released the song that made them so notorious, ‘Je T’Aime … Moi Non Plus’.
  
  People became outraged by that; it was banned by radio stations in Spain, Sweden, Italy and the UK, and the Vatican condemned its immoral nature. But you know how it works – you get massive publicity. Actually, I don’t believe that was deliberate; I think they were much more naive than that and it wasn’t calculated in any way. I think they were doing what they believed in. They became known as this scandalous couple, but they were just passionate and in love. I believe in that; that’s how I run my own life.
  There are loads of archive pictures of the two of them out in Paris and London, just having a good time and looking incredible. They’re captured in this ‘moment’, epitomising that carefree, ’60s attitude, yet they were still really chic, effortlessly stylish.Then there’s the handbag named after her. Unfortunately I don’t have one, but that’s not to say I wouldn’t like one. Apparently she got on a plane, way back when, and dropped the contents of this basket she always carried. She dropped it on this man who happened to be the head designer of Hermès at the time, which was pretty cool. So then he made the Birkin bag for her – this special design where nothing would fall out of the sides. And all because she had so much crap in her bag!
  In 1971 she and Serge had a daughter, Charlotte Gainsbourg, who is now an actress too. They were together until 1980 when she moved out. He was drinking and went into this horrible depression. I read somewhere that she’d said this was his way of saying goodbye. It’s a sad ending – he must have been the love of her life.
  
  Soon after that, in 1982, Jane had a third daughter, Lou, with actor Jacques Doillon. I’ve met Lou, actually, at an Alexander McQueen show in Paris. She’s an actress and model. She has that same teenage woman quality her mum had.
  
  Jane still has this incredible warmth to her. I saw her in concert a few years ago at the Barbican. It was really nice because she talks to her audience as well as singing, and you feel like it’s just you and her in the room; like you’re sitting down to a cup of tea with her. She’s one of those women who has that rare quality. Marilyn Monroe, Brigitte Bardot, Kate Moss, Jane: they’ve all got that. You don’t find it very often, you really don’t. But Jane Birkin has it and you can feel it.
  
  

 

[Glittery_Bug]

http://pipeline.refinery29.com/screen_shot/summer_of_seduction_birkin.php