Jane Birkin was the elegant, delicate, heartstoppingly beautiful singer and movie star with a fascinatingly elusive and free-spirited screen presence. She was a performer with that interesting distinction of being Anglo-French, which somehow added to her unlocatable quality: she was quite at home with both languages, like other stars Charlotte Rampling, Kristin Scott Thomas and, indeed, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Birkin’s daughter with Serge Gainsbourg.
It was her destiny to be thought of as a public figure and national treasure in France, where she made a great many films, and to be placed on an odd kind of pedestal as icon or 60s darling. She had been a fashion model in real life and played them on screen, like the ones in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up, where she made her startling first proper screen impression. And yet this doesn’t do justice to her distinctive screen work, her later character roles and her tremendous capacity for creative friendship and collaboration with film-makers such as Agnès Varda and Jean-Luc Godard.
