The death of English actress, singer-songwriter, and Gallic fashion plate Jane Birkin at the age of 76 has deprived the world of one of its most luminous and unconventional idols. Like Brigitte Bardot, Monica Vitti, and Catherine Deneuve before her, Birkin embodied the fantasy of postwar womanhood in a media culture saturated with images of beauty and obsessed by the new. Although her standing in America has long been (unfairly) elided to a luxury handbag, Birkin was an object of popular fascination in her native Britain and a cultural treasure in her adopted home of France, where she lived for decades. The country’s president Emmanuel Macron described her as an “icône française” and “artiste complète” who “sang the most beautiful words in our language…her voice was as soft as her beliefs were ardent.” Birkin’s public romance and extensive collaboration with singer-songwriter Serge Gainsbourg, from 1968 to 1980, also epitomized a creatively innovative and socially volatile decade in which decadence and desolation often shared intimate company. For her films, music, and style, Birkin became the face, the voice, and the skin of such a period.
Just as Birkin herself believed she was at her most beautiful after 40—when her flawless, English rose face and bohemian accoutrement had been replaced by a mellowing and more sophisticated middle age—her professional music career only blossomed after 40, when she performed live for the first time at Paris’s Bataclan and embraced her own distinctly susurrant, singing voice. Birkin’s most ambitious albums, Ex fan des Sixties, Baby Alone in Babylone, and Amour des Feintes, appeared throughout the late 1970s and ’80s care of Gainsbourg’s songwriting contributions, which continued until his death in 1991. But Birkin recorded and toured intermittently for the next 30 years, releasing new interpretations of Gainsbourg’s songs on Arabesque and Birkin/Gainsbourg: le symphonique as well as haunting new compositions in 2020’s wistful collection Oh! Pardon tu dormais… with French singer-songwriter Étienne Daho.
In spire of her legend, Birkin’s lengthy film career has suffered from a certain obscurity, particularly in America, where many of her French, Italian, and German-language movies have never received a wide release. Beginning with Swinging London souvenirs like The Knack…And How to Get It, Blow-Up, and Wonderwall, Birkin appeared in over 70 films of nearly every genre, including counterculture classics, sexploitation, sex farces and art-porn, gialli and Gothic horrors, period ensembles, New Wave comedies, erotic melodramas, and cine portraits.
To celebrate Birkin’s life and work, Vogue has assembled a short list of her most compelling—or, in some cases, culturally enduring—performances. Each of these selections spotlights the singular beauty, mystery, and joie de vivre that was Jane Birkin.
Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni), 1966
Birkin’s brief ménage à trois with fellow fledgling actress-singer Gillian Hills and raffish star David Hemmings in Michelangelo Antonioni’s counterculture mystery film Blow-Up is best remembered for its flash of Birkin’s pubic hair, an unprecedented transgression in mainstream cinema that proved scandalous in Birkin’s native England. More than mere set dressing, however, Birkin is both sensual and wistful as the nameless blonde whose exhibitionist romp through photographer Thomas’s West London studio in various stages of undress perfectly captures the sexual liberation and exploited innocence of young girls by a new generation of image-makers.
In a 2016 conversation with me, Birkin recalled of the film’s making: “Antonioni came up towards me, and he was so distinguished and so charming. He said, ‘Look, I don’t give actors scripts. So I’ll just give you a page or so of what your role asks of you.’ He gave me these two pieces of paper and said to think about it. Because he wasn’t sure if I wanted to be totally naked in the role. What a lovely man! So when I got I home I told my husband, John Barry, ‘Oh my God, they want me to be naked in this scene!’ He said, ‘Well, if you’re going to be naked for someone, it might as well be for Antonioni, because he is one of the world’s greatest film directors. But if you won’t dare because you always turn the light out [when you change].’ So I thought, Well, yes, I will dare. So I went and did whatever I had to do.”
Slogan (Pierre Grimblat), 1969
Pierre Grimblat’s meta-comedy on commercial filmmaking and media finds its gimcrack auteur and cad Serge Fabergé, played by Serge Gainsbourg in his first film role, traveling between European capitals and engaging in a May-December dalliance with teenage ingénue Evelyne, played by Birkin. The two first met during filming, when, as the story goes, Gainsbourg took an instant dislike to the gangly British actress. Slogan feels like the slapstick, cinematic equivalent of Gainsbourg’s more ribald yé-yé songs, such as “Poupée de Cire, Poupée de Son” or “Les Sucettes,” full of visual gags and double-entendres about middle-age priapism. But Birkin’s portrayal of the doe-eyed objet d’amour has a winking sense of affection that was no doubt inflamed by her and Gainsbourg’s growing onset passion. While the film remains a relic of the mod era, the romantic scenes between Gainsbourg and Birkin convey a certain magical promise of what was to come, including their explosive duet “Je T’aime…Moi Non Plus.”
La Piscine (Jacques Deray), 1969
Made immediately after the completion of Slogan and during the first months of Birkin and Gainsbourg’s love affair, La Piscine presents Birkin’s first dramatic turn, opposite European cinematic icons Alain Delon and Romy Schneider. La Piscine is a louche, sunbaked thriller set near Saint Tropez that captures all of the sexual decadence and drug-addled ennui of the European jet set at the close of the 1960s. Like the similarly disquieting Weekend (1967), More (1969), and Red Sun (1970), La Piscine’s cynical message suggests that the era’s promises of sexual, psychic and cultural liberation would lead to a new decade of paranoia, addiction, and death. Despite her supporting role, Birkin is absolutely entrancing as the awkward teenager Penelope, who is sucked unknowingly into a parlor game of flirtation and intrigue by her father’s old friends. Her Courrèges outfits and teeny bikinis make her every bit the sensual equal to Schneider.
In 2016, Birkin described her life during the making of La Piscine: “Serge stayed with [our daughter] at the Hotel Bibelot, and I went off to work everyday. My parents came to stay. I think my mother realized I was crazy about Serge, because she said that when she [went into] our bathroom, she saw Je t’aime, je t’aime, je t’aime… written all over the bathroom mirror. She knew that I was into something that was serious. And she fell under his charm as well, as did my father. We had wonderful days. It was such fun. It all fit in beautifully. I do think Serge was a bit worried about Alain Delon. [But] I loved Romy. In fact, she’s the one that you look at when watching La Piscine.”
Don Juan, or If Don Juan Were a Woman (Roger Vadim), 1973
Roger Vadim’s softcore, femme-centric reimagining of the Don Juan myth manages to bring together the era’s two greatest sex symbols in Birkin and Brigitte Bardot, the latter a former rival for the affections and songs of Gainsbourg. (Bardot famously recorded an earlier duet of “Je t’aime…” that was immediately quashed by her then-husband.) Bardot plays the (possibly) reincarnated Spanish libertine who lives aboard a chrome and shag-carpeted submarine and seduces men to their ruin. Birkin plays Clara, whom Bardot also seduces in order to take advantage of her roguish husband Louis (“I’m picking them younger and younger,” he dryly observes of Clara. “Unfortunately, she’s always asleep by ten o’clock. Not much fun.”) The scene in which the two women frolic in bed together has often been touted as the saving grace of this otherwise unimpressive work, Bardot’s last feature before retiring from the screen at 39. This was also the last of Birkin’s counterculture films, as she would branch out to more diverse, and challenging, roles throughout the ’70s and ’80s.
Years later, she remembered of the film: “I accepted immediately just to be in bed with Bardot. She’s the most utterly perfect woman. There’s not a fault. God knows, I looked. Even her feet are pretty.”
Je T’aime Moi Non Plus (Serge Gainsbourg), 1976
Serge Gainsbourg’s directorial debut Je T aime Moi Non Plus manages to make his eponymous 1969 record seem like a nursery rhyme by comparison. Gainsbourg cast Warhol superstar Joe Dallesandro as a gay garbage man who attempts an ill-fated tryst with truck stop waitress Johnny, played by Birkin. Filled with dreary, roadside motels, landfills, and painful bouts of anal sex, it is the image of a waifish Birkin in cropped hair and men’s undershirts that has made this film a queer classic, as well as a visual archetype for fashion brands like Calvin Klein and indie filmmakers Greg Araki, Vincent Gallo, Larry Clark, and Gus Van Sant. Je T aime Moi Non Plus was predictably condemned and banned in various countries for many years after. Its status as one of the most controversial exploitation films of the era was to be matched a decade later by Gainsbourg’s third film, Charlotte For Ever (1986).
Birkin later said of Je T aime Moi Non Plus: ”I just thought the whole film was Shakespearean and perfectly wonderful,” although she did admit to covering parts of her body in scotch tape during filming. “I didn’t want anyone to see anything unpleasant.”
The Prodigal Daughter (Jacques Doillon), 1981
Birkin’s first collaboration with director Jacques Doillon, her partner from 1980 to 1993, The Prodigal Daughter is the film in which the maturing actress discarded her ingénue status and took on her most compelling, and disturbing, starring role. Examining the theme of the parent-child bond to uncomfortable, incestuous extremes, the film follows Birkin’s 30-something Anne, who has left her husband and resettles in her childhood home, where she succumbs to emotional and sexual regression. In time, Anne discovers the illicit affair between her father (played by Michel Piccoli, the first of several collaborations between Birkin and the New Wave actor) and a young mistress played by Eva Renzi. Anne’s own jealousy and repressed attraction to her father spills out as she attempts to seduce him. Like Roman Polanski’s late-’60s thriller Repulsion and Serge Gainsbourg’s later film Charlotte For Ever, starring a teenage Charlotte Gainsbourg—Birkin and Gainsbourg’s daughter—The Prodigal Daughter ventures into taboo territories of psychosexual trauma where women suffer from the sins of their fathers.
Years later, Birkin explained of the film: “It was the first time that someone making so-called intellectual films thought of me. Jacques Doillon wasn’t interested in seeing me with my clothes off. He told me: ‘I don’t want you to unbutton your shirt, I want to know what’s happening in your head, and I want you to have a nervous breakdown.’ So after I had made [The Prodigal Daughter] I was regarded as a serious actress in France.”
Love on the Ground (Jacques Rivette), 1984
Love on the Ground was Birkin’s first of several films with New Wave gamesman Jacques Rivette, and this labyrinthine play-within-a-play-within-a-house-within-a-film is emblematic of the director’s ongoing fascination with theatrical ensemble films, beginning with Paris Belongs to Us (1961), L’amour fou (1969), and Out 1 (1971). Birkin and Geraldine Chaplin star as two actresses who are invited by an enigmatic playwright to a vast, suburban chateau, where they are to rehearse and perform a new drama whose audience and finale are unknown to them. Perhaps because of Birkin’s abiding reputation as a muse and ethereal character—a combination of hippie naiveté and affected insouciance that she had cultivated as Gainsbourg’s poupée de son—she worked easily into Rivette’s writerly obsessions with scenery, mirrors, rehearsals, false-starts, doubles, and double meanings. The film’s success led to two further collaborations between Birkin and Rivette: La Belle Noiseuse (1991) and the circus comedy Around a Small Mountain (2009), his final work.
Jane B. par Agnès V. (Agnès Varda), 1988
Jane B. par Agnès V. is one of the great portrait films conceived around the female face by a women director. Left Bank cineaste Varda reportedly moved in with Birkin and her family for more than year to produce this film (along with an unplanned second feature, Kung-fu Master! (1988), in which Birkin falls in love with a pre-teen boy played by Varda’s son Mathieu Demy). Jane B. par Agnès V. captures Birkin’s classic, chiseled face, now entering middle age, in various mirrors and costumes, monologuing into the camera and in bashful profile. The film toggles between domestic Jane and baroque Birkin with a wry sense of slapstick, as when the star appears as Tarzan’s Jane or in an uncanny impersonation of Stan Laurel, complete with three-piece suit and bowler hat. It is also a record of the period in which Birkin belatedly shed her “muse” moniker and reinvented herself as a singer, performing her songs live in auditoriums and concert halls for the first time.
In a 2016 conversation, Birkin told me: “I did Varda’s two films at 40. It was a great age, and, yes, of course, like any actress, I wanted to be funny and sad. It seemed to me that, at last, I could play anyone. At 40, I looked ordinary, and I would no longer be a just a pretty face—if I dared.”
Boxes (Jane Birkin), 2007
Boxes is Birkin’s directorial debut from a script based on her own eccentric family history. In it Birkin’s Anna roams her seaside house, which has become a vast memory palace overstuffed with boxes and characters from her past—some living and some dead—who (re)play important scenes from Anna’s adolescence and adulthood. Birkin cast previous co-stars Michel Piccoli and Geraldine Chaplin to portray her parents, while her third daughter, Lou Doillon, also stars as one of her children. As if to emphasize the atmosphere of fabulous reverie, the film is set in Birkin’s actual house in the Finistère region of Brittany.
There is a sad joy to Birkin’s performance, especially as she pinballs between Piccoli’s beloved but elusive father and Chaplin’s stern and unappreciated mother. Then she must confront all of the knotty questions and simmering resentments that arise from her three daughters, whose respective fathers haunt the edges of the house. “Your memory, Anna, is as selective as a washing machine,” her first husband jeers when he confronts her in the attic. And, indeed, she must wade through the house’s many hidden doors and rooms to find some sense of peace with the past.
After Birkin’s decades of appearing before someone else’s camera, Boxes offers a fascinating glimpse into her own storied life, as envisioned by the artist and muse herself.
Jane by Charlotte (Charlotte Gainsbourg), 2021
In what would be Birkin’s final feature appearance, Jane by Charlotte was recorded by daughter Charlotte Gainsbourg as a cine-portrait reminiscent of Varda’s work 35 years before. But while Varda’s film was concerned with the manufactured fatality of middle age and teeming with vignettes, costumes, and mirrored surfaces, Gainsbourg’s work is a far more muted portrait of Birkin in her dotage, examining her life away from the camera, and interrogating her memories of childhood, love, and death (most painfully, that of her first daughter, Kate, in 2013). “It is a film about a daughter looking at her mother,” Gainsbourg explained to me in an article for Vogue. They lie in bed, prepare a roast, rifle through old souvenirs. The film also includes an enchanting scene in which Birkin accompanies Charlotte to Serge’s legendary rue du Verneuil home for the first time since his death. “It’s almost like being in a dream,” Birkin muses while roaming the house’s interior.
In the film’s final shots of Birkin, who is wandering the Breton shore near her home, Gainsbourg narrates a lament to her mother’s inevitable passing: “The more I look at you, the more I love you. I have always loved you. But it is so much clearer to me now. Why do we learn to live without our mothers? It seems to be a purpose in life: to free ourselves at any cost. I don’t want to free myself.”
Birkin’s last film proves to be a moving, visual epitaph to one of modern cinema’s most spellbinding figures.