2023-07-16 14:59:00
Franco-British singer and actress Jane Birkin was found dead on Sunday at her home in Paris.
By LL with AFP
Published on 07/16/2023 at 2:59 p.m.
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She was the favorite Englishwoman of the French, a fashion icon and a voice tinged with a delicious accent: Jane Birkin died at the age of 76, found lifeless on Sunday in Paris, after leaving her mark on the song and cinema.
The information, given by The Parisian and BFMTV, was confirmed to AFP by a source familiar with the matter. This Londoner of origin, naturalized French, whose name is inseparable from that of Serge Gainsbourg, had recently announced serious health problems which had forced her to cancel concerts.
She appeared weakened during the last Cesar ceremony in February, alongside her daughter Charlotte and her granddaughter Alice. Jane Birkin enjoyed worldwide success with songs like “Je t’aime… moi non plus”, a scandalous duet with Gainsbourg in 1969, “Jane B” the same year or “Ex-fan des sixties” in 1978. The public appreciated her for her sensitivity, underlined by the delicate British accent which she retained throughout her life.
READ ALSODeath of Jane Birkin: the world of culture pays tribute to her
“Unimaginable to live in a world without your light, lamented the singer Étienne Daho, one of his relatives, on Instagram. Sheila, Patrick Bruel have also hailed his memory on social networks.
A legendary couple with Gainsbourg
In the cinema, she starred in Blow Up d’Antonioni, palme d’or in 1967, The swimming pool with Romy Schneider and Alain Delon in 1969, and with directors like Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Doillon, Jacques Rivette or Agnès Varda.
The relationship with Serge Gainsbourg, whom she met on a film set in 1968, gave a new direction to her career. And made the couple a mythical duo in the Paris of the seventies, mixing passion, glamor and scandals.
Jane will end up suffocating in front of the one who is locked up in his excesses which are sometimes doubled by violent outbursts. In 1981, she fled their apartment on rue Verneuil in Paris, with her daughters Kate (born of her union with John Barry) and Charlotte, and rebuilt her life with the filmmaker Jacques Doillon.
Long after the death of Serge Gainsbourg in 1991, and despite hardships such as the disappearance of her daughter Kate Barry in 2013, then a leukemia that took a long time to heal, she always sang the work of the one with whom she formed a couple. mythical.
Jane Birkin was an Officer of the Order of the British Empire and, in France, Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters. But she refused the Legion of Honor in 1989, believing that “only heroes” should receive it.
It was a way of greeting his father, David, a Royal Navy officer who had transported resistance fighters from Britain to France during World War II. He died in 1991, the day of Serge Gainsbourg’s funeral.
The circumstances of Jane Birkin’s death have not been specified.
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