Sweet Jane

Madame Birkin’s oxygen tent is almost ready. How often do you overhear those words on the bus? Well, nobody could accuse this chanteuse, noted Francophile, English eccentric, mother, movie star, dog-lover and sometime free-love icon of having lived a life more ordinary.

I should point out, though, that on this occasion, the tent is purely a means of keeping her whispery, throaty, mid-English channel voice in fine fettle for her Arabesque tour, due to hit these shores on November 28th. Damn, I was rather hoping that I had stumbled onto some bizarre anti-ageing regime. After all, Jane Birkin not only looks about half of her 57 years, but she retains a most girlish aura.
In her adopted homeland, where cinematic grande dames seem all too adept at growing old gracefully, la petite anglaise, as she is affectionately known, has all but cornered the market in growing old disgracefully. Kudos. Since her fully frontal appearance in Blow Up in 1966, Mme. Birkin has gone from causing one sensation to another. She played Brigitte Bardot’s lover in Don Juan ‘72, became inappropriately embroiled with a minor in Kung Fu Master (which she also wrote) and panted her way into a successful recording career with Serge Gainsbourg.
In her most recent screen venture, The Very Merry Widows (showing as part of a Birkin retrospective at the Martell French Film Festival this month), she’s still a gamine, playful presence – a sex kitten who has never felt the need to graduate to sultry cat.
“I’m just being myself, really,” she told me, “I don’t think or plan these things. When I was with John Barry (the composer and Jane’s first husband), I was the kind of girl who slept with an eyebrow pencil under the pillow so that he’d never see me without make-up. Then Serge Gainsbourg was recording Je T’aime Moi Non Plus and I had to get over there before some other girl did.”
Ah yes, the song. It’s hard to talk to Mme. Birkin without her breathy, unbridled turn on Je T’aime hanging around like an elephant noir in the corner. It must get tedious getting accosted for a record made way back in 1968.
“Only when I go back to England,” explains Jane, “I used to be bothered by just being known for one thing there, but since my mother (the actress Judy Campbell) died, I don’t feel I have to prove anything there. You’d feel a bit daft and pretentious going on about your film career and your records. Besides, it really does depend where you are. In France people have been waving at me since Serge and I used to ride around on our tandem bike and in North Africa you can’t turn on the television without coming across myself or my kids.”
Though she left Gainsbourg for director Jacques Doillon in 1980 – cue more raised eyebrows – since Serge’s death in 1990, Jane has become positively evangelical about his legacy. In 1996 she recorded an album of songs composed by her former partner and has since reworked his music with an eastern twist for Arabesque. Not that she doesn’t find time to do her own thing. Her current album, the predictably sensual Rendez Vous features collaborations with Bryan Ferry, Beth Gibbons and Brian Moloko, and in between recording, Mme. Birkin has appeared in over seventy films and inspired a Hermes handbag.
“Oh, the bag,” she exclaims. “It’s so funny because I was sitting on a plane one day and the contents of my handbag spilled out onto Monsieur Hermes’ lap, so I explained to him exactly what kind of pockets ought to be in a handbag and one day they phoned me up and told me they’d made it to my specifications and asked if they could use my name. Now, in addition to being the Je T’aime girl in England, I’m the bag lady in New York. Everywhere I go, I get, ‘Oh Birkin, like the bag’. Even my daughters (the actresses Charlotte Gainsbourg and Lou Doillon) get referred to as the daughters of the bag.”
I point out that the bag merely cements her already unassailable status as a muse to many.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she says with characteristic self-deprecating charm. “I just muddle along. One of the reasons I admire my daughters so much is that they do their own thing and don’t care what anyone says. It’s the only way to be. But I expect everyone will have forgotten all about Serge and I in ten years time.”
Hmm. Somehow I doubt that very much.

The Martell French Film Festival is at the IFI from November 23. Jane Birkin's Arabesque appears live at Dublin's Liberty Hall on November 28