Jane Birkin, the British-French singer and actress whose collaboration with the artist Serge Gainsbourg made her a defining determine of the Seventies and whose private model impressed a luxurious purse, died on Sunday in Paris. She was 76.
Her dying was confirmed by President Emmanuel Macron of France, who referred to as her “a French icon” in a message posted on Twitter. The French news media reported that Ms. Birkin had been discovered useless at her dwelling however that the trigger was not instantly identified.
It was Ms. Birkin’s private and inventive relationship with Mr. Gainsbourg that made her well-known abroad, particularly following their 1969 hit track “Je t’aime… moi non plus” (“I Love You… Me Neither”). In America, Ms. Birkin was largely identified for lending her title to the well-known Hermès purses, standing symbols with a definite strap fastener and signature latch.
Jane Mallory Birkin was born in London on Dec. 14, 1946, to the actress Judy Campbell and Cmdr. David Birkin of the Royal Navy. But it was her years in France that made her well-known and established her as an embodiment of Parisian stylish.
Among her first performing roles was The Blonde in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 movie “Blow-Up.” It was two years later, on a movie set, that Ms. Birkin met Mr. Gainsbourg, starting a love affair that will final 12 years and captivate France.
Their erotic duet “Je t’aime… moi non plus,” whose lyrics are punctuated by breathy moans from Ms. Birkin, was seen as exemplifying the sexual revolution of the Sixties. It was condemned by the Vatican.
Following the breakup of the Gainsbourg relationship in 1981, Ms. Birkin continued singing and performing, together with in movies by Agnès Varda and Patrice Chéreau. In 1983, she launched the album “Baby Alone in Babylone,” which included music and lyrics by Mr. Gainsbourg.
Mr. Gainsbourg, a director and composer whose music helped pioneer modern French pop music, died at 62 in 1991.
“He wrote for me from 1968 until the day he died,” Ms. Birkin stated in an interview with The New York Times in 2018. “Why he went on asking me to interpret the songs that I had inspired I don’t know — but perhaps he knew that I’d be faithful at least to that.”
Ms. Birkin’s gamin seems to be and carefree bohemian method transfixed generations of the style-conscious and impressed the costly and extremely coveted Birkin bag from Hermès.
“I would love to have been a sort of neat person and wear a Kelly,’’ she said in a 2018 YouTube interview, referring to the ladylike handbag created and named for the film star Grace Kelly. “But I never thought you could get enough in it.’’
The collaboration with Hermès, the French luxury house, started after its chief executive, Jean-Louis Dumas, saw Ms. Birkin struggling with a straw basket on a flight to London, its contents overflowing onto the floor. Ms. Birkin said she had not been able to find a leather bag she liked. Hermès devised the Birkin, which was, as she requested, “four times the size of a Kelly.’’
Ms. Birkin was additionally popular in France as an activist for women’s and L.G.B.T.Q. rights and also for her British accent when speaking French, which the French found endearing.
“The most Parisian of the English has left us,” the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, wrote in a message on Twitter. “We will never forget her songs, her laughs and her incomparable accent which have always accompanied us.”
Ms. Birkin suffered a gentle stroke in 2021 and had not too long ago canceled a collection of concert events due to well being points.
She is survived by two daughters she had with Mr. Gainsbourg and the French movie director Jacques Doillon: the singer-actresses Charlotte Gainsbourg and Lou Doillon, every of whom has, like their mom, impressed designers and followers of style.
Guy Trebay contributed reporting from New York.
Source: www.nytimes.com