When Jane Birkin confided in Vogue

Jane Birkin / GUNNAR LARSEN/

From the archive: When Jane Birkin confided in Vogue

Jane Birkin's English accent, delicate voice and modern appeal made her an idol. A musical partner to Gainsbourg, a muse to many, an actress and a singer, she exuded an air of discretion that seemed at odds with her dazzling hits, which included such masterpieces as Je t'aime... moi non plus, The Swimming Pool, The Pirate, and Les Dessous chics. Here, we look back at an interview that saw her share some of her most precious memories with Vogue.

BY OLIVIER LALANNE

    16 july 2023

16 juillet 2023

Jane Birkin arrived in France just as England was captivating the world with its cultural revolution, thanks to talents including The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Mary Quant, David Bailey, Twiggy, David Hemmings and Terence Stamp. With her androgynous silhouette, doe eyes, candor and irresistible accent, Birkin soon became Serge Gainsbourg's muse and partner. Their flamboyant freedom, elegant panache, and highly erotic, suggestively whispered hits - such as Je t'aime... moi non plus, La Décadanse, and Sea, Sex and Sun - made them the most legendary showbusiness couple of the fiery 1970s.

While forever linked to Gainsbourg, Jane Birkin forged her own personal path - both through music and on the big screen - championed by Doillon, Rivette, Godard, Wargnier and Chéreau. She exuded an air of discretion that seemed at odds with her dazzling hits, which included such masterpieces as Je t'aime... moi non plus, The Swimming Pool, The Pirate, and Les Dessous chics. Her whispery, tightrope voice, unfettered spontaneity and her dazzling performances in popular comedies (Lucky Pierre, La Course à l'échalote and more) made her a national treasure. With unwavering popular support, the actress and singer remains a legendary figure (photos of her have become synonymous with timeless style) and in life, she continued to bring her late mentor’s moving music to the stage.

Six years ago, Vogue France met the French icon, dressed in her signature jeans and barefoot, for afternoon tea in her cozy house in Paris’s 5th arrondissement. In the background, we could hear the less-than-musical snoring of her bulldog Dolly. Read the interview below.

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Gainsbourg's style

“It’s all about me, he listened to me a lot. To start with, it took him some time before he grew a beard; he looked younger than he was, and it gave him a complex. I thought he was very handsome with an eight-day beard, so he bought himself a trimmer and kept it like that. It looked like natural makeup, created shadows and sculpted his face. You want to look after men with beards because you have the feeling that they’d been sleeping rough. And yet, I found that having no hair on his chest or his arms looked very distinguished. I bought him dowager-duchess-style bracelets that he wore on his wrist and a diamond to wear around his neck. It was stolen on one New Year’s Eve in Pigalle and I replaced it with a sapphire. I’m allergic to socks. You immediately imagine a guy naked with just his socks on, which is ghastly. One day, I was in the Repetto store and, in a basket full of sale items, I found a pair of men’s pumps in soft white glove leather. I bought them for Serge. He had flat feet and shoes hurt him. He wore those white pumps without socks his whole life. The same goes for underwear. I find it much more erotic to be naked under jeans. And I told him so.”

Her accent

“Without my accent, I would have had a different career. The French gave me a real gift in accepting me very quickly. They found me amusing, in large part because of my accent and the mistakes I made in French. It’s no doubt one of the reasons I never sought to improve it. I am sometimes cross with myself for not having made more of an effort. I remember on the shoot of The Swimming Pool that Deray got me to talk with a pencil in my mouth so that I would articulate. It was humiliating and it didn’t make much of a difference. When Téchiné was shooting The Brontë Sisters, I asked him if I could be in the film. He said that there was already Adjani, Huppert and Pisier, that he couldn’t see a role for me. I wanted to play the brother and the Brontës were English. He answered: ‘Yes, but I’m making a French film.’ So there you go, I wasn’t always right for the role, there were some parts I couldn’t play.”

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Gainsbourg and Birkin, the legendary couple

“You’re exaggerating, we weren’t the Kennedys! We must have represented a form of freedom. The twenty-year age gap, our lifestyle, we went out at night and came home to wake up Kate and Charlotte before school, and then slept in the daytime. That was my fantasy, our lack of taboos [ … ]. Serge used to say: ‘We are not an immoral couple, we are an amoral couple.’”

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Style icon

"I'm absolutely not aware of that, but Lou often told me that on Instagram, in particular, I was widely referenced. It's complicated to explain that. I am English and I come from an environment where I was always comfortable. It matters a lot. I could dine with anyone and eat my salad with my fingers. I've never been concerned about whether things are happening or not. When I arrived in France, I was a copy of Jean Shrimpton. The French women were very well groomed at the time, certainly, there was Françoise Hardy and her Paco Rabanne dress, but she wore it only knee length. I had some lines removed to make it look like a long shirt. When I see the pictures ... I didn't realize it was so transparent. This is the flash effect of the photographers' camera. If I had known, I would not put knickers on! Serge had also bought me very pretty dresses at Saint Laurent, he had even made me an haute couture white lace model for a ball at the Rothschilds. I also remember going up the stairs to Cannes with a dress I was wearing back to front. And then there is this famous Portuguese basket that I bought at a London market and that did not leave my side. If I was denied entry to Maxim's because of my basket, I didn't care. I had this assurance. When I see photos of me from 1968, my big doll eyes underlined with eyeliner, exaggerated mouth, bangs, I find it horrible. I found myself the most interesting at forty. I started wearing Scottish cotton marcels, agnès b men's shirts, oversized pants upgraded with a thin red leather belt and sneakers without laces. Oversized Men's clothes are good when you get older. We look fragile. At one point, you have to know how to give up the ladies' dresses. They make you look older. It's like makeup, at a certain age, stop playing with false eyelashes. Otherwise, it becomes terrifying."

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Serge in private

“He looked dark, ‘mad and dangerous’ as people said of Byron, but he was a clown. I don’t know any writer or poet of his skill with such imagination. He loved entertaining the children and did it as no one else could. He wasn’t a brooding artist who sat alone bored in a corner. He wanted people to come and see him; he was very accessible. At the same time, he was very sarcastic, brilliant, sometimes cruel for the pure pleasure of making a pun. I refused to speak to him for several days after he wrote on an album cover: ‘Take women for what they’re not and leave them for what they are’. I found it ugly and hurtful, and he said: ‘What did you expect, Janette, it’s just wit.’ He was obviously right. I remember a number of things about him that were so funny. I've never met anyone more generous, capable of taking 500 francs out of his attaché case to give to a taxi driver he would never see again so that he could have his teeth done. He was a prince. In the end, we were like old friends. I loved being his confidante, that suited me fine.”

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"The Swimming Pool" with Delon and Schneider

“The film saved me and enabled me to stay in France. I just finished Slogan and was due to go back to England. Serge was heartbroken and cried, for a whole night, holding a candle that was lighting his face so I could see his tears. Not long after, Serge and I were dining with Pierre Grimblat, and Jacques Deray came by. It was Grimblat who told Deray that he knew a girl for him who has never been seen before. Delon and Romy still had to approve. When they gave their approval, we went to Ramatuelle [ in the South of France ] like gypsies, Kate’s nappies tied to the roof of the car and her pushchair on the back seat. Serge hired a huge American car to show off in front of Delon. It was so wide it couldn’t get down the narrow streets. Romy was an angel. Deray was cross with me because I turned up for the shoot with my daughter. There was Delon’s son, Anthony, and David, Romy’s son, who were about the same age, and I thought taking Kate along was a good idea. Deray was furious. Like in the film, I was seventeen, and supposedly untouched, so if the journalists saw Kate, that would be the end of that project. After we argued about it, I locked myself away in the bathroom at the villa and cried. Romy found me there and said she was going to ask Deray to apologize. He eventually did. She was like that [ … ]. The atmosphere on the shoot was highly erotic. Even if I didn’t know much about the love affair between Romy and Delon, you could feel the tension. It was then that I understood what a team was. The film revolved largely around Romy and Delon, but the cameramen had a photo of me in their camera to boost my morale. Technicians are often your best friends on a shoot, more so than the actors.”

Reg Lancaster/Getty Images

"Je t’aime… moi non plus"

"Jealousy drove me to perform the song. I remember that Serge was getting a television crew and journalists to listen to the version he’d made with Bardot, which was never released, and there was a very pretty girl in a kilt lying on the sofa. When I saw how proud he was to get the journalists and the girl on the sofa to listen to it, I thought I’d better be the one to sing it, especially since other actresses were interested. Mireille Darc asked him: ‘So, Sergio, what has become of that little song ?’ I didn’t want him to end up in a telephone box with a beautiful girl recording another version of Je t’aime… moi non plus, as he’d done with Bardot. When he suggested I do it, I agreed immediately. We met up in a huge studio in Marbella and in two takes we had the final product. Back in Paris, we went for dinner in the wine cellar of the Hôtel des Beaux Arts. There was a record player, and without saying a word, Serge put the song on and all of a sudden all the couples around us stopped talking, their knives and forks in mid-air. Serge pinched me and said: ‘I think we’ve got a hit record.’ We never thought for a moment that the song would become such a symbol of freedom all over the world. People listened to it in secret, from Spain to Argentina. The Pope banned it, the BBC banned it too, and in Italy, the head of Phonogram Records was thrown into jail. I was making another bad film in Oxford and every day we saw Je t’aime… moi non plus climbing higher in the charts. It was crazy.”

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 Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

The first meeting with Serge

"I first met Serge in France for the screen tests for Pierre Grimblat’s Slogan. He was very swarthy, had an exquisite, unusual face, and was wearing a mauve shirt. He was caustic and sarcastic, not unpleasant, but I could see he didn’t really care much about anything. As the master of the manor, he could have insisted on another girl, since the film depended on his name. Marisa Berenson, in particular, had just auditioned and was sublime. He was kind and told me that he would never have had the nerve to attempt a test in a language that wasn’t his own. I learned the texts phonetically without understanding a word of what I was saying. I saw the tests recently and I was really bad. So the man who loved sophisticated, erotic and mysterious women found himself in the company of a crybaby who was merging cinema with her private life. This disgusted him. My life would never be the same again. Despite what I would have imagined, my parents were delighted. After seeing me so miserable with John Barry, they, at last, saw me happy. Serge won my mother over because he reminded her of Eric Maschwitz, who wrote A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square particularly for her. My father thought he was extremely funny. They took their sleeping pills together like two owls. All of them knew that they would have to get along with one another for me to accept the situation. They had to like each other. Serge told my sister, ‘The day I die, I will come and get your father.’ Daddy died four days after Serge.”

Bridge Films/Carlo Ponti Production

"Blow Up"

"I mainly remember the day of the audition. I didn’t even know who Antonioni was. I was asked to write my name on a wall, and every three letters, to turn my profile to see if I was photogenic. An Italian assistant was really bothering me, and I burst into tears. Antonioni came out of the decor and yelled: ‘Stop, that’s enough. I’ve seen what I wanted to see.’ He wanted to see emotion, and he had. John Barry, my husband at the time, told me that I’d never dare show myself naked on set because I always turned the lights out at home. I was seventeen [ … ]. So, just because he’d said that I did dare.”



Stephan C. Archetti/Keystone Features/Getty Images

"Goodbye London"

"John Barry had just left me and left for the States. I had my baby, Kate, and I found myself back at home with my parents. Everything around me collapsed. I didn’t want to stay at home waiting for something to happen. I was in a restaurant on King’s Road with my friend Gabrielle and we heard about an audition for a French film, Slogan, which the prettiest girls in London were flocking to. I think the director, Pierre Grimblat, found me amusing. I blessed him for hiring me. I don’t know what I’d have become in England. Would I have dared to act on stage, when my mother, Judy Campbell — Noel Coward’s muse — was the most beautiful woman in England according to Cecil Beaton, and a huge star? With my father’s family, would I have dared to have a career with such freedom as I had in France? All of those things were highly unlikely. I think we’re always escaping from something.”

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My flaws are my qualities

"I suffered a lot because of my physique, especially at boarding school. The others said I was half boy, half girl. I had no breasts, not even a developing bosom. It was horrible. I was extremely lucky to meet Serge. When he was a student at the École des Beaux Arts, he drew a girl, who looked just like a boy, except that she had breasts like mine. He took me to the Louvre to show me Cranach’s paintings and explained that I was a Cranach and that big breasts frightened him. He was exaggerating though. He had just come out of a relationship with Bardot, but Cranach’s was the type of beauty he preferred. After the misery of the boarding school and my marriage, it was incredible meeting someone who found me beautiful and decidedly erotic. He reconciled me with myself. When a man loves you, it changes everything.”

“The Prodigal Daughter,” Jacques Doillon

"This film was the first time that I had received such reviews when the critics thought I was good on screen. It touched me deeply to be taken seriously. I didn’t know Doillon’s films and knew nothing about the depth of the psychological problems dramatized, and the impressive amount of dialogue. No one had ever offered me a part like that or asked me to have a nervous breakdown or made me want to be locked up in a room with my father to find out if I was his favorite daughter. I completely let go. I was suddenly allowed to go ballistic on screen. It’s no doubt what Charlotte loves about working with Lars Von Trier. It’s not as dangerous as it looks [ … ]. Through me, Jacques was talking about his relationship with his own father. Men have often seen me as their friend, starting with Serge. It is quite common among film directors, Bergman among them. Despite appearances, there was something infinitely sad about me, that terrible feeling of guilt that has stayed with me since childhood. Jacques spotted it. Later, we made The Pirate and I let go even more. When the film was screened at Cannes, it caused a scandal, and that’s when Patrice Chéreau suggested I play Marivaux’s La Fausse Suivante. That was my first stage experience, which finally gave me the courage to sing at the Bataclan. I saw The Prodigal Daughter again at the Cinémathèque, and Piccoli and I were really good. If I die, I would like the film to be shown on television, even at midnight. Meeting Jacques was a real turning point in my career. In my private life, after I left Serge, Jacques and I lived together for thirteen years, and had Lou.”

Brigitte Bardot and Jane Birkin

Don Juan, or If Don Juan Were a Woman

"We were shooting a scene for the film in a car, and Bardot was in tears because she couldn’t get the take right. I think that Vadim must have said something the night before that really hurt her. When she got out of the car, I saw that people were delighted that she was upset. She inspired jealousy, whereas I inspired friendliness. I wasn’t dangerous, women didn’t have the impression I was going to steal their husbands. Bardot was extremely generous to me, which can’t have been easy in view of our shared interest in Serge. We had a bed scene together, and we didn’t know what to do, so we thought we ought to sing a song. Bardot said: ‘Why couldn’t we sing Je t’aime… moi non plus?’ I refused, and finally, we sang My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean. I observed Bardot in the tiniest detail to find a flaw in her. Her mouth, her nose, her skin, her hair… She was fabulously beautiful.”

Jane Birkin

Michel Piccoli

"The encounter with Michel was the most beautiful one that I’ve ever had in the business. I love his qualities as a man, and his political, social and cultural commitment. I hold him in great moral esteem, not to mention as an actor. It’s a dream to play opposite him. Sometimes, when I stumbled over certain lines, he would stick them on his hat. Michel doesn’t take himself seriously. He has a great sense of humor. He is just like I imagine Mastroianni was.”

Patrice Chéreau

"I was filming Leave all Fair in Normandy, quite a serious film with John Gielgud when Chéreau turned up on the set to offer me the part of the countess in La Fausse Suivante at Nanterre. I was really an idiot because I didn’t even know who Chéreau was and I thought he wanted to make a film of Marivaux’s play. He was so handsome, so seductive, that I didn’t want to let him get away. Gielgud asked him what he was doing there and Chéreau told him that he had come to ask me to play the countess in La Fausse Suivante. Gielgud apparently retorted ‘Ambitious’, which wasn’t very kind, but Chéreau told me that much later. I went to the Amandiers theatre with my mother to see his staging of Combat de nègre et de chiens, then his opera Lucio Silla. Seeing them was a shock, rather like being a witness to a car crash. Patrice was the most wonderful director I’ve ever worked with.”

Remorse and regrets …

“It doesn’t do you any good, it just eats you up, not to mention the guilt that haunted me since I was twelve. It’s quite a mental construct to tell yourself that everything’s your fault. I don’t even dare admit that I’m happy because I think I’ll be punished the next day. When I told this to Kate and asked her whether she ever felt the same thing, she said: ‘No, I don’t think so. I’m God’.”

Actresses

“I love funny actresses, comediennes, Marilyn obviously, she was irresistible. But also Shirley MacLaine in The Apartment, and all Billy Wilder’s films. Audrey Hepburn, and Leslie Caron, another ‘pretty ugly duckling’, as we said at the time, whom you didn’t know how to use in France. Her little pout in Gigi was to die for, far more interesting than beautiful ‘femmes fatales’. I was so sad when Marilyn died. I told myself that it wasn’t possible, not her, she made us laugh so much. Garbo OK, but not her!”

Gilbert UZAN/

"Baby alone in Babylone"

“This was the album of the break up when everything changed. All of a sudden, Serge got me to sing of his wounds and his feminine side. It was very unsettling to sing about the wounds that you have triggered. Before that, he wrote lighter songs for me and sometimes asked others to write lyrics to his music for me when he didn't have time. That’s how Philippe Labro came to write Lolita Go Home. I must say that I was tired of singing as the little girl who excites gentlemen in trains. I had the feeling that I had become something else. We recorded Baby alone in Babylone in eight days. Serge wrote two songs a night, keeping himself awake with cigarettes and black coffee. He was exhausted. He wrote in capital letters on sheets of paper because I had trouble reading his writing. They were thrown into the bin. Can you believe it? I sang as high as possible so that I wouldn’t disappoint him; I knew he liked that. It was overwhelming to see him behind the glass. He didn’t care whether I could be understood or not, what he was after was the emotion. The other evening, I plucked up the courage to watch an old interview with him, on YouTube, in which he said that I was the best at singing emotion. I didn’t have a contract with a record label, there was no hurry, and I could see that he was worn out. I told him: ‘Serge, there’s no hurry, we have time to record this,” but he was absolutely set on it. He said: ‘I owe you that.'”

Destiny

"I don’t believe in destiny. I think we can change everything all the time. Accidents are the best things in existence. They force you to leave a route that seemed to be mapped out, and it’s often when you branch out that you meet some incredible guy who changes your life or an unusual project that turns your career on its head. It’s often when things aren’t going well that we are forced into doing them differently and they suddenly become interesting.”

Death

"Before, when I was asked how I wanted to die, I would answer: ‘The first.’ Alas, life has decided otherwise. We are all a little scared of death when we feel it approaching. The idea is so distant, so abstract. We have trouble imagining it. Over the last three years, I have come close to it twice, and, surprisingly, I didn’t panic. I was more frightened of not having time to say what I wanted to say, to leave things in order, to be forgiven.”

Archive Photos/Getty ImagesIn love

"As soon as I fell in love, I was overcome by the fear that I would lose the man I loved, convinced that all the other girls were more interesting than I was. This insecurity, this lack of self-confidence is frightening for the other person, especially as it inevitably goes hand in hand with jealousy. I must have been impossible to live with. I am very happy today to no longer be in love. When love isn’t there, pain doesn’t exist either.”

If there was only one song left …

“Les Dessous chics, because it really is a portrait of Serge. It represents the modesty of feelings, made up outrageously in blood red. Les Dessous chics means keeping one’s true feelings deep inside, as fragile as a silk stocking. No further comment.”

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