For many, she’s a movie icon, from her humble beginnings in her native England with small parts in Michelangelo Antonioni‘s Blow-Up and Kaleidoscope to her successful path through many years of French cinema, going from popular comedies in the 70s to the César- nominated dramatic roles in the 80s and 90s. working with great directors such as Jacques Doillon, Jacques Rivette, and Agnes Varda. For others, she’s the other half to the unforgettable duo she formed with Serge Gainsbourg, with whom she sang Je t’aime mais non plus, the song that sparked a revolution in 1969 when it was banned in several countries and denounced by the Vatican. She was also the singer behind 20 albums in a musical career that spans 50 years. Her last one, Oh! Pardon tu dormais, partially inspired by a play she wrote many years ago, was recently launched in the US. She is also the mother of Cannes Best Actress’ winner Charlotte Gainsbourg, singer Lou Doillon and the late photographer Kate Berry. Jane Birkin is radiant at 74, talks about a bit of everything, and keeps the same magnetism that made the world fall in love with her many years ago.

You never planned to be a musician, an actress, a writer or a songwriter. When you look back, are you surprised that you did 70 films and 20 albums, among many other things?

Yes. I am surprised.  I am surprised from such an ordinary beginning, because I don’t think there was anything particularly special. When I arrived in France at 20 years old, my luck changed.  Had I stayed in England I don’t know that I would have encountered very much.  I was very influenced by my mother who was a stage actress and very beautiful, and would I have dared to do something on the stage in England? I don’t think so.  The movies possibly but when I went to France everything changed and there was a sort of freedom that there wasn’t in England, the thing of not being seen too much, at least so I thought.  And meeting Serge Gainsbourg really changed my entire life.  Then I see the films that I made at the beginning like La Piscine, with Alain Delon and Romy Schneider who was just beautiful, but I am not very interesting. And then two or three films go by and then I do Je’ taime moi non plus with Serge and I’m a sort of little doll person who tries to look like Jean Shrimpton.  By the time I was 40, I was working with Agnes Varda and Jacques Doillon and I was doing theater and being on the stage for the first time and singing for real at the Bataclan.  And things just went on like that and I was able to have the luxury of expressing myself in songs for the first time when I made a little album called Enfants d’hiver, about the nostalgia of childhood.  And it didn’t do very well but it didn’t matter, because I still went on with shows, with Serge’s songs that I was able to do with wonderful musicians that took me all around the world.  And then I published my diaries and then I did Birkin/Gainsbourg Le Symphonique, and that took me around the world. And then this record comes out and I am still sort of surprised that it would still be interesting to people, that you are still someone people are curious about, that seems to me to be an extraordinary piece of good fortune. 

It’s an amazing career.  You showed up on Michelangelo Antonioni’s set when you were a teenager and that movie is now historic.  Did you have the feeling that you were just a girl letting waves take you?

I suppose so in that I really had to fight with people I met because they had more ambition for me than I had for me, and saw me in things that I hadn’t imagined, like making a record with Serge even though I didn’t have a great voice, he found some charm in it.  And that led to another thing that leads to another thing. I did a screen test with Antonioni and I didn’t know what to do and I started to cry, and he said that’s just what we want.  And even when I was 16 I did a play where I forgot all the words when I got onto the stage and Graham Greene said that’s what we are looking for, the symbol of innocence, you are perfect.  So I have just been fortunate to bump into people that found some interest in me.  And then one thing leads to another.  You do the film like Jacques Doillion’s The Pirate and then Patrice Chereau sees that and thinks oh I will put you in a play which is Marivaux and I didn’t even know what Marivaux was, I said I am sure she is very good.  And he said no, Marivaux, he is a man and you play the countess in sort of middle ages practically.  So it was such a brave thing of him to do, to take this person who had never done theater at all, and to put her on stage with Michel Piccoli.  And I couldn’t let him down, so threw myself into it and I think I was very good in La fausse suivante.  And because I did that, then Agnes Varda thought she’d make a film with me. I gave her a little script about a woman of 40 and a boy of 15 and so we made that too.  And lovely Jacques Rivette, I did a film with Geraldine Chaplin, so he wanted to make another with me and Piccoli and another one.  And so all those goodies happened because one person saw something and therefore another person cottoned on.  Because I left Serge and led a private life with Jacques Doillion and he saw me in dramas that no one had ever seen me in before.  And actually I had been that person all along but no one had thought of it before.

Do you think Serge was ahead of his time when he sang with you Je t’aime moi non plus? It’s amazing that so many years later, that song is still remembered…

What was fun was the fact that in many countries it was banned of course after a couple of weeks.  But before the newspapers came out there was time for it to spread like wildfire and people used to bring in the record under Maria Callas’ album covers, and so it was a sort of secret song. And I heard later that people took it as a freedom song, it even went further than a sexual song, it became something that was illicit and therefore gave the hope of freedom even in Spain I was told under Franco.  When Serge sang it with Bardot, I realized then that it was very catchy, and that’s not even with the heavy breathing and all the rest. A taxi man would say, I have five children on that fucking record.  (laughter) I went to Buenos Aires, and I was looking for something for my daughter Charlotte about ten years ago and I went up to the place where you buy old postcards, they were selling records and so I saw Je’ t’aime moi non plus and they said oh are you, and I said yes I am.  So all the antique market people came out and I said look I’ll sign them all and they were more expensive to sell.  And so it was very jolly and when I die, I know that that will be the music that when you go out feet first, you might as well have something you know and that will be my song.

When you were working on your new album, Oh! Pardon tu dormais…, you still felt that you don’t have a great voice or you didn’t care?

Well, when I sang the Gainsbourg Symphonique I had to sing with a symphony orchestra and I did manage to do it quite well.  So I got a bit braver.  And then on this last album Etienne Daho wanted to me to have a voice like I speak, so he didn’t want me to make an effort to sing very high like I did with Serge, where I was on cortizone so often, trying to hit the top notes on tour, it was always a panic whether you were going to lose your voice, cause you sing so terrifically high.  And he just wanted it to be comfortable, so in fact on this last album, I could speak it and it was mine.  And if there was any pain, it’s mine.  And I am not having to play somebody else although probably one is always playing somebody else, because that’s the slant you took on it for the album and it’s very one-sided, like writing a diary really.  So I had his enthusiasm all the time, I mean we were just on the clip for Oh Pardon tu dormais, and his enthusiasm, his energy, his cutting around all my words in the play I wrote and underlining everything that he wanted to make into songs. This has been a collaboration which has been so remarkable, I had nothing to say, and he said yes you have, you wrote that thing called Oh Pardon Tu Dormais, and he’s been at for years saying why don’t we make it into a comedy musical?  And I never had time or it wasn’t the right time or he didn’t have time.  I don’t know, when my daughter died I just wasn’t much good at anything for a year, two years, three years, got rather ill and then went on tour saying Serge’s words with many of the songs, it wasn’t much of an effort to do and it brought me out of the house again.  And then we got to Canada and that’s where we had the idea of a Philharmonic just for two cycles and it went on for nearly four years.  So this album has been cooking for a long time, except for in the years after I lost Kate. In my diary, in the last pages I wrote Cigarette, which is a song about her falling.  And then I wrote another one about the cemetery.  So I gave him those first two songs because it was more important than Oh Pardon tu dormais and it was more important than anything I had ever written before.  And I couldn’t not talk about her.  So we started with those two and he had the idea of putting Cigarette to music that was really a bit like Kurt Weill and that made it strange and honest and direct and sort of shocking, but rightly so.  And then the one at the cemetery was easy of course it’s more political, and then we could go back to Oh Pardon tu dormais.  And then I wrote Ghosts, which involves everybody and involves my nephew who died. And then I got the idea for the last song which was Catch Me if You Can which is a mixture of Kate and me as seen on her agenda, she had put a Post it which says, “happiness to see between the parents” and I thought what’s that?  And I looked it up on the internet to see what the story was and so I worked the song around that and her again.  But for the rest of it, it was bits of text that were all written in a moment of anguish about 30 years ago. I had the same melancholy or the same sadnesses or the same ruptures in my private life and although it’s 30 years later you sort of open up the wound again to get a bit more blood.  And it was very satisfactory to do it with Etienne because he seemed to be exactly on the same jealousy suffering thing that I was, so he egged me on.

How difficult was it for you to be a mother? You were a mom so young but at the same time you had this public life….

In those days we didn’t think about it very much.  All I wanted from when I was about 18 was to have a baby.  So when I had Kate, I brought her along in a basket. I used to take her out in a basket into nightclubs and into all my life with Serge. And then when Charlotte came along too, so we had two children to keep up with us.  I don’t know, I am not saying that I am a good mother because I think the film I wrote, Boxes, focused on the question of whether I had been the mother I had hoped to be.  I am sure there were many changes for the children, just because it made me happy for them to tag along, how complicated it was for them to have scandalously well-known parents – teasing at school, children ringing the doorbell to see whether I opened the door naked, other jealous parents making their kids tease Kate and Charlotte.  I was so fortunate to have Lou very late, and so like all last children, it was a sort of wonderful bonus.  And then as her father left, it was even more wonderful because she was the sort of cheering up of all time.  And so (her children) probably managed their children better than I did because I think in their cases their children always came first.  And I think Serge came first a lot of the time with Kate and Charlotte. Jacques left so I was able to have more of a tete-a-tete with Lou.  I don’t know, the children will say whether one managed it okay or not.  I just think that they worked their lives better.

The acting probably came from your mother, but what do you think your spy father gave you?

He wasn’t a spy, he was with the French Resistance and he was a navigator, he picked people up and dropped people off on the French Coast, he was heroic and a chivalrous sort of father.  He was the one that had more fun on my movies, because my mother could then go back to the theater whilst I kept my father occupied.  And he was a wonderful sport on films, he even played parts, he played Villager One, Two and Three, in a very bad sort of vampire film I did in Italy, it was always an adventure to have him and Serge with me. They both followed me and they both kept each other company whilst I was working. He has great fun with me doing the movies, which he wouldn’t let my mother do ironically.  And then when he died, I could appreciate my mother for everything she had, being funny, stoic, smile and the world smiles with you, cry and you cry alone, a woman who was on the stage at 88 and came over to New York where she sang in the New York Town Hall after 9/11 and she never told us about it and apparently she disappeared into nightclubs with all the youth.  So I think that I had a great start, well a long start, because they were with me for a long time.