Opening page: Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg in Vogue, 1970. Opposite and previous page: Birkin in her acting heyday
Angeles for a part where they said that if I had false bosoms and broke my legs in three portions and they could get me a different sort of structure that I could go up for a television show. I told them that I thought life was too short.” Grimblat’s interest was piqued; he sent her off to Paris, post haste, to screen-test for Slogan with famed French provocateur Serge Gainsbourg. Birkin recalls praying for “a tiny accident – just enough to break my leg and not turn up to this film test where I can’t speak French and I look a right nit. When I got there, there was this arrogant man in a mauve shirt. I think I said, ‘Why don’t you say, how are you?’ And I think he said, ‘Because I don’t really care’”. Keen to “settle things up” with the mauve-shirted man once it was decided they’d be working together, she took Gainsbourg to dinner at Paris club du jour Chez Regine, asked him to dance… and that was that. “He walked on my feet,” she remembers, “and he was so clumsy, and I thought, oh, it’s divine, this man who’s pretended all along to be so sophisticated – well, he was too shy to dance.” In Gainsbourg, Birkin had found a kindred spirit. Now the stuff of legend, their love burned brightly for more than a decade and gave her a second daughter, actress Charlotte, as well as a starring role in French counterculture.
Everyone, young and old, relates to her normality Gainsbourg’s increasing struggles with melancholy and alcoholism led to their separation in 1980, but their deep admiration for one another endured until his death 11 years later – just days before the death of her father. “Sadness and grief are emotions she has had to deal with in terrible doses,” explains Crawford. “Her beloved father dying three days after Serge… You have to understand they were her world.” It’s entirely characteristic of Birkin that she credits the men in her life – notably, Gainsbourg, Barry and Doillon, with whom she had a third daughter, Lou – with much of her success. So careful is she to never seem the least bit self-important, in interviews she frequently uses ‘one’ instead of ‘I’. 65
Remembering the golden years with Gainsbourg and her eldest daughters Kate and Charlotte, for example, she says, “Paradoxically one had become the most popular girl in France for the most cosy family reasons… I’d become a part of every French family because of my family – practically my royal family, in that becoming a part of Serge’s family was nearly royal.” It was this relationship, with her adoptive France, that set her on a benevolent new path in the 1990s. “I was socially aware that there were great differences and I suppose because I love France I wanted to make [things] somehow more equal, to stick up for people that hadn’t got that much money, to get laws passed,” she recalls. One campaign led to another and, as an ambassador for Amnesty International, over the years Birkin has visited some of the world’s most impoverished, war-torn countries. “I can’t put on bandages, but you can bandage people’s hearts,” she says, matter-of-factly. Ever the pragmatist, she refused France’s highest honour, the Legion d’Honneur, in recognition of her charitable work (“It’s for war heroes, it’s not for showbusiness people like me”) but accepted an OBE “for my mother’s sake”. For Crawford, who’s published two collections of photographs of Birkin, in all her various guises, her friend’s appeal is simple: “If she is an icon (and she hates the expression!) I think it’s because everyone, young and old, relates to her normality. In 50 years she has not changed as a person. She holds the same views and conforms for no-one.” Birkin’s may be a strange sort of normal, but I can see what Crawford means. Through both great fortune and great tragedy, she remains at heart the same wide-eyed girl, shy but full of wit, who won over a nation, and then a generation, with her mellifluous charm. It’s fitting then, that her 70th birthday belongs to her fans – and, in part, to Gainsbourg: on 14 December, she’ll be in Clermont-Ferrand, in the very centre of France, singing “Serge’s songs” (as she calls them to this day) on tour. “Her 70th birthday? Unimaginable really,” says Crawford, “but I know that her choice to be on stage in concert singing Gainsbourg that night is the best place for her to be.”