Jane Birkin, who helped outline stylish feminine sexuality of the Nineteen Seventies as an actress in arty and erotic European motion pictures and in her relationship — equal components romantic and creative — with the singer Serge Gainsbourg, died on Sunday in Paris. Ms. Birkin, who later turned recognized for uplifting top-of-the-line recognized traces of luxurious purses, was 76.
Her demise was confirmed by President Emmanuel Macron of France, who known as her “a French icon” in a message on Twitter. The French news media reported that Ms. Birkin had been discovered useless at her residence however that the trigger was not instantly recognized.
The kid of a famously lovely actress and a socially related British naval officer, Ms. Birkin led a life guided by many glad accidents.
Whereas she was on a flight in 1984, a plastic bag wherein she was retaining her possessions broke, main her to complain aloud that Hermès didn’t make a bag that would match all her issues. The person sitting subsequent to her occurred to be Jean-Louis Dumas, the chairman and head designer of Hermès. The corporate launched the Birkin bag line the identical yr — in simply the massive measurement she had requested.
Commonplace Birkin luggage now sell for $10,000, and the difficulties of acquiring one — given a posh manufacturing course of and a intentionally rationed provide to boutiques — have given the bag the cachet of exclusivity.
Her relationship with Mr. Gainsbourg started simply as fortuitously, in 1968. She was in her early 20s, her first marriage having fallen aside, when, with out specific renown as an actress and with out talking a phrase of French, she managed to be forged in a French film, “Slogan,” starring Mr. Gainsbourg.
The 2 fell in love, however Ms. Birkin didn’t see a solution to stay lengthy in France. Then, eating out one night time, she had an opportunity encounter with the French director Jacques Deray, received employed to behave in a film of his, stayed within the nation and solidified her relationship with Mr. Gainsbourg.
She lived in France for the remainder of her life, and her engagement with Mr. Gainsbourg and his music proved equally enduring.
Probably the most notable product of their collaboration and romance was their 1969 hit recording of Mr. Gainsbourg’s track “Je t’aime… moi non plus” (“I Love You… Me Neither”).
Within the track, a duet, Mr. Gainsbourg speaks of intercourse in a low, conversational voice as Ms. Birkin confesses her love in suggestive murmurs and moans and the high-pitched singing of an ingénue.
The track was condemned by the Vatican and banned in a number of international locations and by the B.B.C. tv community. Nevertheless it offered thousands and thousands of copies.
Practically 50 years later, in 2018, Ms. Birkin was nonetheless singing music by Mr. Gainsbourg, by then on a world tour of orchestral variations of his songs.
“If I’m singing in Argentina in two weeks’ time,” she told The Guardian, “it’s due to ‘Je t’aime.’”
Jane Mallory Birkin was born in London on Dec. 14, 1946, to Judy Campbell, an actress who gained renown for performing for British troops with Noël Coward throughout World Battle II, and Cmdr. David Birkin of the Royal Navy.
In 2021, her father’s exploits throughout World Battle II had been recounted in “A Harmful Enterprise,” a guide by Tim Spicer, a former British navy officer. Commander Birkin’s duties included navigating boats on moonless nights throughout the English Channel to deliver to security Allied spies, stranded airmen and escaped prisoners of conflict who had discovered themselves in France.
Ms. Birkin, at 18, married the British composer John Barry, recognized for arranging the trademark theme to James Bond motion pictures, they usually had a daughter, Kate. At 20, Ms. Birkin appeared in Michelangelo Antonioni’s hit 1966 film, “Blow Up,” an erotic story of a London style photographer. She performed a style mannequin — the credit listed her as solely The Blonde — and gained some consideration for a risqué nude scene.
“Had all of it labored out with John Barry, I might by no means have been curious to know what was occurring wherever else,” Ms. Birkin told The Guardian in 2017. “I might have simply gone on being his spouse. I might have been delighted. However as a result of he went off with another person, and I used to be left with Kate, I needed to discover a job fairly quick.”
That led to her audition for “Slogan.”
The film that saved her in France was “La Piscine” (“The Swimming Pool”), starring Alain Delon and Romy Schneider. (It discovered sudden renewed popularity in america in 2021.) A sun-soaked movie of intercourse and jealousy with many pictures of scantily clad actors, the film proved to be an efficient showcase for Ms. Birkin’s long-limbed magnificence.
Her romance with Mr. Gainsbourg captivated the French public. She was the younger doe-eyed expat, he the growing older however nonetheless virile creative genius. The connection lasted for greater than a decade, ending when she left him within the early Eighties for the French movie director Jacques Doillon. Mr. Gainsbourg died in 1991 at 62.
Although Ms. Birkin would later communicate self-deprecatingly about her position as Mr. Gainsbourg’s muse, she embraced turning into “the keeper of the Gainsbourg flame,” as The New York Occasions labeled her in 2018.
She described to The Occasions connections between the music he wrote for her and work by classical composers like Chopin and Brahms.
“I might have thought that he was most likely France’s most fashionable author,” she stated. “He invented a brand new language, he reduce phrases in two like Cole Porter.”
Ms. Birkin launched “Oh! Pardon tu dormais…,” her first album of her personal songs written in English, in 2021. “The outcomes are an emotional tour de pressure from an artist who has by no means gotten her musical due outdoors of France,” the music author Ben Cardew wrote in a overview for Pitchfork.
Ms. Birkin additionally continued to behave, together with in movies by Agnès Varda and performs by Patrice Chéreau. She was additionally well-liked in France as an activist for ladies’s and L.G.B.T.Q. rights in addition to for her British accent when talking French, which the French discovered endearing.
“Probably the most Parisian of the English has left us,” the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, wrote in a message on Twitter on Sunday. “We’ll always remember her songs, her laughs and her incomparable accent.”
Ms. Birkin had a light stroke in 2021 and had not too long ago canceled a sequence of concert events due to well being points.
She is survived by two daughters, one with Mr. Gainsbourg and the opposite with Mr. Doillon: the singer-actresses Charlotte Gainsbourg and Lou Doillon, every of whom has, like their mom, impressed designers and followers of style. Her different daughter, Kate Barry, a photographer, died at 46 in 2013 in a fall from a window of her fourth-floor Paris residence.
Ms. Birkin found that her romantic separation from Mr. Gainsbourg didn’t dim their collaboration. He saved writing new songs meant for her till he died.
After their breakup, “you would discuss again to him for as soon as,” she told The Guardian. “You weren’t simply his creation any extra.”
Man Trebay contributed reporting from New York.
