[1/2]The 74th Cannes Film Festival – Photocall for the film ‘Jane par Charlotte’ (Jane von Charlotte) presented at the Cannes premiere – Cannes, France, July 8, 2021. Director Charlotte Gainsbourg and actress Jane Birkin pose. Portal/Johanna Geron
PARIS, July 16 (Portal) – British-born actress and singer Jane Birkin, a wild child of the 1960s who became a popular figure in France, has died in Paris aged 76, France’s culture ministry said on Sunday with.
The newspaper Le Parisien and the TV channel BFM, citing people close to her, reported that she had been found dead in her home. Birkin suffered a mild stroke in 2021 after suffering from heart problems in previous years.
Birken is best known abroad for her 1969 hit, in which she and her then-lover, the late French singer-songwriter Serge Gainsbourg, sang the sexually explicit “Je t’aime…moi non plus.”
Since the separation of her marriage to the British composer John Barry in the late 1960s, she has lived in France, her adopted country. Aside from her singing and her roles in dozens of films, she was popular in France for her warm personality and her steadfast fight for women’s and LGBT rights.
“This departure is so sad. She was a wonderful person,” former culture minister Roselyne Bachelot told BFM.
Jane Mallory Birkin was born in London in December 1946 to British actress Judy Campbell and Royal Navy commander David Birkin.
Before venturing across the English Channel at the age of 22, she rose to fame with the controversial 1966 Michelangelo Antonioni film Blow-Up, in which she appeared nude in a threesome sex scene.
But it was in France that she found real fame, both for her love affair with troubled national star Gainsbourg, and for her fierce style and endearing British accent when speaking French, which some say she cultivated on purpose.
She had a daughter, Charlotte, with Gainsbourg.
After that relationship broke up in 1981, she continued her career as a singer and actress, performing on stage and releasing albums such as Baby Alone in Babylone in 1983 and Amour des Feintes in 1990, both with lyrics and Music by Gainsbourg.
In 2002 she wrote her own album Arabesque and in 2009 released a collection of live recordings, Jane at the Palace.
Reporting by John Irish Edited by David Goodman and Frances Kerry
Our standards: The Thomson Portal Trust Principles.