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Jane Birkin was a prolific actress with a film career that spanned decades, starting back in 1965. Born in London, Birkin mostly worked as an actress in French cinema, becoming a major movie star in the country for her early roles in films like Slogan, La Piscine, and Cannabis. Alongside her work as an actress, she was a singer, with a number of studio albums throughout her career. However, Birkin is perhaps most famous for being the namesake of Birkin bags, fashion house Herms' most famous luxury handbags.

Sadly, Jane Birkin passed away on July 16, 2023, just two years after suffering a stroke in 2021. Her last film was the docu-drama, Jane by Charlotte, the directorial debut of her daughter, Charlotte Gainsbourg. Since first appearing in an uncredited role in the film The Knack... and How to Get It in 1965, Birkin had a legendary career right until the end.

Daddy Nostalgia (1990) Jane Birkin...

Jane Birkin graced the front pages of most French newspapers on Monday as France mourned the death of the late British actress and singer who enjoyed icon status in the country that she had called home since the late 1960s.

“Our tears can’t change anything,” proclaimed Le Parisien newspaper, which first broke the news of Birkin’s death at the age of 76 on Sunday.

Libération ran with the simple headline “Without Jane”, while regional newspaper Le Maine Libre referred to the late actress as “The Eternal English Bride of France”.

International obituaries have highlighted Birkin’s notorious performance with partner and late bad boy of French pop music Serge Gainsbourg on the 1968 pop song, ‘Je t’aime… moi non plus’, or the fact she inspired the Hermès Birkin bag.

For the French, she was much more.

In a six-page tribute, Libération mused over the reasons for Birkin’s never-ending...

With Jane Birkin’s passing, France loses both an icon and one of its greatest enigmas. To focus on France is not to diminish the fact that Birkin’s death will be mourned around the world. Alongside Brigitte Bardot, Françoise Hardy and Catherine Deneuve, Birkin was one of the last surviving 1960s femmes who sparked global interest in French culture.

Except that Birkin wasn’t French. She was born in London and clung to her English accent all her life. Birkin was perfectly fluent, but cultivated a faux-naïf way of speaking her adopted language that reinforced her persona as the eternal child. For the French, it was all part of her singular charm, established decades earlier… and which she sometimes struggled to escape.

As partner and muse to Svengali-like songwriting genius Serge Gainsbourg, Birkin posed for the cover of his “Histoire de Melody Nelson” album, wearing only a red wig and open-waisted blue jeans,...

Jane Birkin, the British-French actress, singer, and style icon who inspired the eponymous Hermès Birkin handbag, has died at the age of 76.

According to Le Parisien, the iconic singer-actress was found dead at her home in Paris on Sunday. No further details have been shared at this time. Birkin had canceled a series of performances in Paris scheduled earlier this year for health reasons. She was previously diagnosed with leukemia in 2002 and suffered from a minor stroke in 2021.

Jane Mallory Birkin was born in Marylebone, London on December 14th, 1946. Raised in Chelsea with her brother, screenwriter and director Andrew Birkin, she audition for small acting parts before marrying composer John Barry in 1965 and giving birth to her first child, the late photographer Kate Barry, in 1967. In the meantime, she landed breakthrough roles in 1966’s Blow-Up and Kaleidoscope as well as 1968’s Wonderwall.

Birkin and Barry divorced in 1968, and the actress moved to Paris,...

Jane Birkin, the British-French actress, singer, and style icon who inspired the eponymous Hermès Birkin handbag, has died at the age of 76.

According to Le Parisien, the iconic singer-actress was found dead at her home in Paris on Sunday. No further details have been shared at this time. Birkin had canceled a series of performances in Paris scheduled earlier this year for health reasons. She was previously diagnosed with leukemia in 2002 and suffered from a minor stroke in 2021.

Jane Mallory Birkin was born in Marylebone, London on December 14th, 1946. Raised in Chelsea with her brother, screenwriter and director Andrew Birkin, she audition for small acting parts before marrying composer John Barry in 1965 and giving birth to her first child, the late photographer Kate Barry, in 1967. In the meantime, she landed breakthrough roles in 1966’s Blow-Up and Kaleidoscope as well as 1968’s Wonderwall.

Birkin and Barry divorced in 1968, and the actress moved to Paris,...

Jane Birkin, the Anglo-French actress, singer and fashion icon known in part for her decade-long romantic and artistic partnership with musician Serge Gainsbourg, died Sunday, French President Emmanuel Macron announced. She was 76.

It was first reported in Le Parisien and Bfm television that Birkin had been found dead at her home in Paris. The actress suffered a mild stroke in 2021, but her cause of death has not yet been revealed.

“Because she embodied freedom, because she sang the most beautiful words of our language, Jane Birkin was a French icon. A complete artist, her voice was as sweet as her engagements were fiery. She bequeaths us tunes and images that will never leave us,” Macron wrote in a statement posted on Twitter.

Born in 1946 in London, Birkin began her career while still a teenager as part of the “Swinging London” scene of the 1960s. She appeared mainly in small roles in art and counterculture films,...

Jane Birkin, the iconic British-born actress, singer and model who became a chart-topping artist in France with her collaborations with then-partner Serge Gainsbourg, has died at the age of 76.

Birkin’s death was announced Sunday by the French culture ministry, which said Birkin was found dead at her Paris home. No cause of death was provided. Birkin recently canceled concerts due to unspecified health reasons; in recent years, she also suffered a stroke and battled leukemia.

French president Emmanuel Macron tweeted Sunday, “Because she embodied freedom, because she sang the...

Jane Birkin, the beloved British-French actor and singer who spent most of her life in France and is known for a tumultuous relationship with French singer-songwriter Serge Gainsbourg, died on Sunday at her home in Paris, according to Le Parisien newspaper. She was 76.

No cause of death has yet been confirmed.

Birkin was best known internationally for her steamy 1969 duet “Je t’aime… moi non plus” which she sang with Gainsbourg, one year after meeting him on the shoot of Pierre Grimblat’s “Slogan.” Although she hadn’t broken through at the time, she had a small but memorable part in Michelangelo Antonioni’s sultry 1966 film “Blow Up.”

Together, Birkin and Gainsbourg had a daughter, the actor and singer Charlotte Gainsbourg. After splitting in 1980, the pair remained close and pursued their artistic collaboration. Birkin was creatively involved in three albums by Gainsbourg, “Baby Alone in Babylone” in 1983, “Lost Song” in...

Jane Birkin, the singer and actress who rose to fame in the late 1960s as the lover of French bad boy Serge Gainsbourg and became a beloved figure in her adopted France, has died. She was 76.

The French culture minister announced the news on Sunday following reports in Le Parisien newspaper and Bfm television that said Birkin had been found dead at her home in Paris. She had suffered a mild stroke in 2021.

Although born in London, Birkin would find fame singing in French. Her duet with Gainsbourg on the sexually explicit song “Je t’aime…moi non plus” (which was banned in several countries and condemned by the Vatican) made her a household name around the world.

The song was recorded in 1968, just months after the pair — Birkin, then 22 years old, and Gainsbourg 40 — had first met on the set of the film Slogan, forging a turbulent relationship that would...

Jane Birkin, the English-French star who collaborated with Serge Gainsbourg on the risqué hit “Je T’aime… Moi Non Plus,” died July 16, French media reported. She was 76.

She and Gainsbourg were married from 1968-80 and worked together on “Je T’aime… Moi Non Plus,” released in 1969 – and recorded the year before, six months after they met on the set of the film Slogan. The song topped the UK chart and was Top 5 in several other European countries and Mexico but was not a hit Stateside.

The song, originally written by Gainsbourg for Brigitte Bardot, caused a scandal on its release for its sexual content. It was banned by radio stations across the UK, Italy and Spain, but became an enormous and instantly recognisable hit across the world.

Although born in London and a leading light of “the London scene” of the 1960s, Birkin found fame singing in French — and she...

At the start of Jane B. par Agnès V., a 1988 documentary made about singer and actress Jane Birkin by, well, the French director Agnès Varda, Birkin sits in period dress and looks directly at the camera with her characteristic deadpan expression. She talks about the nausea she feels when she looks at herself in the mirror and sees the signs of aging on her body. She has just turned 40 but talks as though she is much older, the consequence of experience.At the 2021 Cannes premiere of her daughter Charlotte Gainsbourg’s new documentary, titled Jane par Charlotte in deliberate homage to Varda’s film, Birkin is 74. She arrives dressed in the relaxed-fit blue jeans and oversized white shirt she made iconic in her twenties. She seems to be inviting comparison, to highlight how much she has aged while retaining her je ne sais quoi. Something so deliberate must come from a position of self-confidence,...

"A little bit of phantasmagoria and a lot more 'And-then-he-fucked…' grungy glamour, Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life is at its best when its mythologizing is carnal and infused with cabaret, and not making the inflated claim of its title." Bill Weber in Slant: "Writer-director Joann Sfar, a comic artist adapting his own graphic novel's version of the life of French singer-songwriter Serge Gainsbourg, generally eschews staples of the musician biopic like stage-performance recreations and studio-session drama. His focus is first on the artist as a boy in Nazi-occupied Paris, born Lucien Ginsburg (Kacey Mottet Klein), wearing a yellow 'Juif' star with poise and already cultivating his interests in art and women, and then how he fashioned himself into the roguish seducer personified in the 1960s hit-making persona of salacious Serge (Eric Elmosnino, a near-lookalike with the requisite lascivious panache and curled lip)."

Sylviane Gold opens her New York Times piece on the film,...

Director: Joann Sfar Cast: Eric Elmosnino, Lucy Gordon, Laetitia Casta, The name Serge Gainsbourg brings to mind that peculiarly French brand of charming and sexually liberated arrogance. His music was playful and rude, his showmanship delightfully droll. Cigarette in hand, with croaking wisps of biting sarcasm, he encapsulated perfectly the laconic but immense passion of the French spirit. But behind this illuminated public persona lay an introverted and stubborn individual. Gainbourg’s stooping physique may have seemed, to his fans, like the sulking, lackadaisical haunch of a genius; but in fact it was the gait of a stubborn man ploughing forward through his life without a thought for the friends, relatives, and lovers he was leaving in his wake. Gainsbourg was born to Russian-Jewish parents in Paris in 1928. His father was a bar pianist and his mother a soprano, but Gainsbourg was determined to become a painter and, after being expelled from school,...

Serge (Gainsbourg) is a hip and successful film director who leaves his pregnant wife to attend the annual advertising awards festival in Venice, and enters into a passionate affair with a young British woman (Jane Birkin). This sexy satire formed the background for one of the swinging sixties' most famous real-life romances. During the rehearsals for Pierre Grimblat's "Slogan", Serge Gainsbourg met the woman who would forever change his professional and personal life: Jane Birkin. They sang together for the first time on the film's theme-song, "The Slogan Song". After which, they recorded their version of "Je t'aime moi non plus". The song became a huge success and set the 70's on fire. Together, they lived out one of the most beautiful love stories ever. Featuring music by Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin

The Two Disc Special Edition features Bonus Disc including new and vintage interviews with Serge Gainsbourg,...