Jane Birkin

[MulletProof]

Jane Birkin-Inspired Editorial.

JEANS COMME JANE
Vogue Paris March 2007.
Photographed by Peter Lindbergh
Fashion Editor: Emmanuelle Alt
Model: Jessica Miller at Next.
Scanned by TFSer BerlinRocks.

http://img223.imageshack.us/my.php?image=vogparmars07jeans02tp4.jpg

http://img92.imageshack.us/my.php?image=vogparmars07jeans10cl0.jpg

 

[1karina1]

^ I absolutely this editorial! God bless Emmanuelle Alt!

 

[misstarshine]

That is an great editorial. Thanks MulletProof

 

[adore dior]

i'm getting that issue

 

[60swildchild]

EROTIC BIRKIN​

Jane Birkin was the English waif who captured the heart of France's favourite son, Serge Gainsbourg, and created a lifelong career for herself as a barefoot bohemian muse.​

From: Evening Standard - London | Date: March 10, 2006 | Author: MARIANNE MACDONALD

Jane Birkin is the legendary Sixties sex symbol and lover of Serge Gainsbourg they had the most famous affair in France. For years they sat at the best tables in Paris nightclubs and were followed by photographers. But as he slid into alcoholism, the relationship became violent. She recalls once being so irritated by his fumbling for his door key at 4am that she hit him on the head and he split his eyebrow on the door frame. The next morning, he had no idea how he'd got the injury.

He died in 1991, 11 years after she left him for the film director Jacques Doillon. But she was devastated. 'Jane became a mausoleum, with Serge at the centre,' her brother admitted. Drowning in grief, she started singing Gainsbourg's songs compulsively. So her life has had as much misery as glamour, but I get no sense of this over lunch at The Pelham Hotel in South Kensington. It's fascinating that someone can put such a gloss on their life.
She once admitted she'd refused to notice when her daughter by John Barry, Kate, became addicted to drink.

I last met her eight years ago. Then she was deep in mourning fragile, and almost speechless.

Today she is more confident: she makes eye contact (albeit obliquely) and talks in an amusing stream of consciousness. Her voice is still girlish at 59, French-accented, occasionally substituting French words for English ones.
She's still amazingly busy she has been playing Gertrude to Tobias Menzies' Hamlet in Northampton, recording her 15th album, Fictions (with songs written for her by The Magic Numbers, Tom Waits, and Gonzales) and even dueting with Franz Ferdinand.

She seems so caught up in herself at first that I think I could leave the table and she would keep going like a tape. But as I throw in questions, I realise she is connecting she stops what she is talking about and changes to my topic. She is dressed tomboyishly in a grey V-neck jumper, jeans and Converse sneakers, her brown hair wound round a pencil. She is still beautiful. If I looked that good at almost 60, I'd be thrilled.

Her new album is about coming home. But with typical feyness, she says she has no plans to move back to England, which she fled at 19 after her husband John Barry, the dashing composer of the James Bond theme tune, ran off with her best friend, Ingrid Boulting.

(They'd been married a year: 'He drove off,' Newsweek reported of their wedding, 'in his E-type Jag with his E-type wife.') She says she did inherit money two years ago and asked an estate agent if she could buy a place in Chelsea. 'I said, "Can I buy a basement?" He said, "We're talking about a million." And I said, "Then we're talking about forgetting it!" Then I thought it would be nice to find a room over a grocery shop in Waterloo.'

Why? 'Because I like the idea that when you're very old you can send a basket down on a piece of string.' She giggles appealingly.

Jane Birkin's special subject is grand passion she and Gainsbourg were so in love, all France was in love with their love. Not many people have one, I tell her. 'That's why it's so nice. That's why you cannot settle for anything less.' But don't you miss it when you don't have it? 'No, because I don't feel like going down that road. It's like when people say, "What are the good nightclubs these days?"

I say, "I simply couldn't tell you, because I did it all so well with Serge. Why on earth would I go back and do it less well?"' By the time Barry left her she had had a bit part in The Knack, the Mods and Rockers film that also launched Jacqueline Bisset and Charlotte Rampling, and filmed a semi-nude scene as a model in Antonioni's Blow- Up, which was thought very scandalous at the time. However, while her career took off, she was left holding Barry's three-month-old baby, Kate. 'I thought it was my fault,' she observes, digging into her haddock and poached egg. 'I thought I hadn't been sexy enough. He was off with a lot of people.

I was very jealous. And he was 13 years older. It can't have been easy for him. I absolutely remember throwing jam pots at the door and nearly missing him.' Nearly hitting him, surely? 'Yes,' she says vaguely. 'The only good thing about those things is that they make you grasp for something else.' So off she went to France to play the lead opposite Serge in the 1969 romantic comedy Slogan, in which Gainsbourg's married ad man woos and loses Birkin's English girl. He was 40, twice married, and had two children. Was it instant attraction? 'No, instant dislike on his part. I was crying a lot, and Serge thought that was disgusting, that I was ruining my role in the film, which was perfectly true. But then I found his funny face, his sense of humour, his everything, divine.' She replaced Brigitte Bardot as his lover.

She cups her breast. 'He said he was frightened of [her] bosoms, and I thought, "Great!"' Bardot provided the original breathy counterpoint to Gainsbourg's sexy rumble on the 1969 song 'Je T'Aime, Moi Non Plus'. But when Bardot left, she banned him from using their version. Jane was quick to step in. The song, an amorous conversation set to music, was banned around Europe and condemned by the Vatican, but reached number one in the UK.
Being half of France's most romantic couple, however, was not so romantic.
Serge insisted on singing a duet about incest, 'Inceste de citron', with their 13-year-old daughter Charlotte. A video featured him half-naked lying on a bed with Charlotte surrounded by smoke and feathers. Birkin tried to stop him making the video, but he overruled her.

Always a depressive, Gainsbourg's drinking grew worse. 'It was sad and difficult. But he was so sweet the day after. "Oh, did I really do that? Oh, sorry!"

But it was no longer four or five nightclubs, it was always the same one, and anyone who could buy him a drink would ask him to play the piano in France he was a mythology, the greatest person since Rimbaud. It was like being Chopin's wife.

There I'd be at 6am, saying, "Oh, let's go home!"

You think, "Will anyone find me for me?" and you fall for a beautiful young director who says, "It's you, it's you, I don't want to film you nude."' Jacques Doillon made her finally feel appreciated and in 1980 she moved out of Gainsbourg's house.

So was she happy she got away? 'No! I was so frightened something would happen to Serge! But when I had my girl [Lou Doillon] he said, "Oh, thank God, I can't imagine being godfather to a boy!" So he got himself back as the godfather! Piles of clothes arrived at the hospital, cashmere booties with fur linings she couldn't even get into after a day.' He gave Jane a Porsche convertible.

It was hard for Doillon. 'But he didn't have much choice, because he knew Serge, too, and so that was the way it was,' Jane says airily. 'And he went on to make four films a year, and after the first two, which had me in them, they did not have me in them. And I was very fortunate that Serge went on writing songs for me, because I was a bit cheesed off, thinking, "Why isn't Jacques making movies with me? He rushes off three times a year to distant parts of France with the most beautiful young actresses and I'm looking after the children."' She seemed to get closer to Serge after they split. But 15 years after his death she claims she is over him. 'It's the other people who remind me constantly, with the pressure to talk about him, the pressure to go round the world singing his songs.' (A fairly self- imposed pressure, it must be said.) Her grief at Serge's death was so devastating that Doillon had to leave, after 13 years, in 1993.

'I would see my mother crying on TV for Serge, saying he was the love of her life,' Lou Doillon once said. 'For my father, it was hard.' The last man in her life was Le Monde foreign correspondent and writer Olivier Rolin. They met delivering books to children in Sarajevo. Jane sold her house in the rue de la Tour cluttered with memorabilia (pictures of Serge and Doillon and stuffed animals) and moved to St Germain des Pres to be near him. 'It was a terrifying vision for Olivier I think he thought we'd live further apart.'

They broke up in 2000. 'Olivier is my greatest chum, he would cross the world to get you out of prisons, even if you were happy to be in them!' she says valiantly she is obviously a little sad. 'I've nicked his friends, the way I held on to Jacques' friends and to Serge's family. But that's six years past, nothing in view, as they say in Battleships.' She darts me a glance.

'But I'm not sunk, either!' Her most recent bereavement was the death of her mother aged 89. Judy Campbell was an actress and a beauty. Jane's father David was a tubercular war hero who farmed in Berkshire and then became a painter on the King's Road. 'My father thwarted her career because he was a jealous man, he wanted her all to himself,' she lets slip, before hastening on to sunlit uplands. 'They had a wonderful time. He was dashing and interesting his family were from the North of England, and he ran away and started coughing up blood in a London clinic from about 18 and he kept serpents under his bed. They were the most elegant pair. My father was so passionate about my mother, and she was going round with Noel Coward during the war, and my father was constantly writing, saying he was in the phone booth waiting to put the coin in but would he find her at home? It was a divine childhood.' This may not be true judging by Oh Pardon! Tu Dormais, her play about a tortured couple (her and Doillon) discussing their relationship she has a healthy dollop of neurosis and after she left Miss Ironside's, her strict London school, she decided to act, against her father's wishes.

Her mother coached her secretly.

'I've always liked people cleverer than me, I love people's talent,' she says. 'Olivier said, "Oh! John Barry, Serge Gainsbourg!" And I said, "I've only known three people and had a kiddie with each." I wanted a baby with him and he wouldn't have any of it. I was really cross. That child would have been about ten now. I remember saying to Jacques, "I've only slept with three people! I could put them on to one hand!" And he said, "Ah, you're very proud of that little hand, aren't you!"' Her refusal to confront ugly truths is charming, but can't be easy for her children. Kate spent a decade running a rehab centre in France after she became an addict. All three daughters have had therapy, but Jane is sunny about them. 'I've got three corkers,' she says. 'Kate is more beautiful as the days go on; she's a photographer, she's done quite a few magazine covers of Charlotte.' Charlotte is an actress. 'She did a film with Sean Penn, 21 Grams, so she's all right Jack!' Lou is a regular at fashion shows.

'She's just gone to New York and Los Angeles to act.' You wonder what they make of this woman who looks like their sister. 'People only turn their heads in France because they know me. No wolf whistles in Italy!' she exclaims cheerfully. 'I'm frightened of the knife, in case they get something wrong!'
Obliquely, glancingly, as she seems to do everything (except fall for men), she gathers her overflowing bag. 'It's usually when things go wrong that they get interesting,' she observes. 'Had John not gone to America I wouldn't have found Serge.

So I wouldn't say tragedies are bad.' I ask if she is happy. A long pause.
'Other people's distress is something I find nearly terrifying,' she says.
'When Serge died, I said, "God, God, God, why did I leave?" But my brother Andrew said, "Is there anything that happened since leaving Serge that has been better?" "No, no, no!" "No one, or nothing?" And I said, "Lou!" I wish I hadn't hurt so many people. But it is nice when you're on stage and you see people wiping away tears. Lucky, I would say. I have been lucky!' Fictions is released on 20 March

Copyright 2006 Evening Standard - London

 

[travis_nw8]

one minute of jane:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzZvZyqsRwA

 

[Harumi]

^^She sounds like a total egotistic, as usual. Also, her accent thing is a fraud. When she speaks French she has a thick English accent and uses English words all the time. She does the reverse thing when speaking English. Obviously she thinks it's charming.
Anyway, I like her even if she's a nutcase.

 

[1karina1]

thanks so much travis_NW8 for the video link. I always find Jane's british accent so disconcerting because it is just so upper class, posh....and you hear can it when Lou and Charlotte speak in English...

 

[travis_nw8]

one more youtube clip- from merci DrRey - truely awful film except for jane birkin- playing a voice dubbing actress with dilutions of grandeaur ( thinks she's vanessa redgrave from dubbing her in movies)...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5c3TYG7C_k

 

[Boomer]

A very young and beautful Jane with David Hemmings in "Blow Up", 1966
(ScreenCap by me)

 

[TheKiwi]

Beautiful! I love that movie.

 

[babypeace]

that does not look like her at ALL

 

[Boomer]

that does not look like her at ALL

Major mistake!! There was a blond and brunette in this scene; Jane evidently was a blond for this movie...I never looked that closely before since the are very similar in the film..Good eye though!!
I'll get a couple of Jane-Caps together here...

 

[Boomer]

Jane's dress off, one to go...! (As above)

 

[chocolatestain]

She's gorgeous. Thanks so much for all the amazing pictures. Her style is truly timeless.

 

[chic stranger]

she's so beautiful!

 

[MulletProof]

nice caps, boomer.

 

[Mirik]

Glamour Rus March 2007
by me

 

[Little Tiny]

Yeah Boomer,THANKS!!!!That movie is FABULOUS!!!!!It's funny though,I totally didn't catch her in that movie-I was too dazed by Verushka!!!!Jane is gorgeous too though!

 

[StellaMare]

three pictures from my scrapbook... if someone has the original of the first one, post it please