Singer, actor and sex symbol Jane Birkin plays Dublin this week. The passing of time has not slowed her down, as Arminta Wallace finds out
It could be the plot of an arty French film. Mother, a classic English rose, produces a celebrated wartime rendition of A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square. Daughter runs away to France and becomes one of the most high-profile rebels of the 1960s generation. In due course she herself has three daughters by three different men; the girls are beautiful, talented, independent and remarkable. The men, needless to say, are pretty hot stuff too; and the rebel, though still regarded somewhat askance in her native England, becomes a French icon. Fin.
That, at least, is where the film might end. In real life, Jane Birkin's life story keeps on producing new chapters. The gauche sex kitten who gasped and sighed her way through the 1969 hit Je T'Aime: Moi Non Plus became an accomplished film actress who made 70 films in 30 years, from scabrous Benny Hill-style romps to art-house movies directed by Jacques Rivette and Bertrand Tavernier. She was in Death on the Nile and The Last September. She has written a radio play called Oh Sorry, Were You Asleep? and played the part of Andromache in Euripides's Women of Troy. There have also been a brace of bestselling albums, including the recent Rendez-Vous, which had her duetting with Bryan Ferry, Caetano Veloso and Beth Gibbons of Portishead.
These days, with the age scales tipping 60, Birkin is slowly but surely circling the world in the company of a group of north African musicians. It is an unlikely proposition - the very French songs of Serge Gainsbourg sung by his very English ex-lover in an Arabic idiom - but the world, it seems, can't get enough of her album, Arabesque. They've already toured across Europe, the Middle East and most of North America, with forays as far afield as Hong Kong and Rio de Janeiro. Christmas will see the release of what she calls "a bumper box": a live recording, plus the filmed version of the concert, plus a documentary, plus a new recording which, she says, "will show the progress that I hope we've made in three years".
Progress in a musical sense?
"Well, yes," she says. "It's quite difficult to sing to Arab rhythms if you've never done it before - so I used to be very scholastic and just watch Djamel's bow on his violin."
And now?, I ask, but she has already flowed on to another topic.
An interview with Birkin isn't so much an interview as a fluid stream-of-consciousness monologue in which she doesn't so much answer questions as flow back and forth as the current takes her. She is amusing, self-denigrating, charming. And frank; boy, is she frank. If she's like this on the phone from San Francisco to a complete stranger, what must she be like in person? Today, the current is sweeping us towards her mother, singer and actress Judy Campbell.
"She died in June - on D-Day," she says. "I was able to sleep on the floor for two weeks and grab every last moment I could have with her. We were just about to make . . . I mean, I had finally got the funding for Boxes, which I wrote the script for and in which she would have had a starring role. She died with Boxes in her hand. She wanted me to do it - and she was a very critical lady. She didn't like the play I wrote, or the production of Women of Troy that I did - and she certainly said so."
Grief has laid its heavy hand on Birkin's shoulder: at various stages in the conversation she speaks of her mother's "style, wit and elegance" and recalls, with obvious regret, screaming at her in a square in Moscow.
"I was a mouse in comparison to her," she says. "She was so independent all her life. She took to a car at 17, and she had her running-away money that she kept - and was constantly offering to me when I was in trouble."
When, one might be tempted to ask, was she not? Having made her acting début playing a deaf mute in Graham Greene's play, Carving A Statue, Birkin married John Barry - composer of the James Bond 007 theme - at the age of 19 and had a daughter, Kate, with him. Then came the film Blow Up, in which she was the first British actress to do a full-frontal nude scene. The resulting furore saw her flee to France with her baby. When she was signed up to co-star in the film Slogan with the French actor, singer and national anti-hero, Serge Gainsbourg, it was love at first sight. The worldwide hit, Je T'Aime: Moi Non Plus, followed in 1969.
Birkin and Gainsbourg stayed together for 12 years, during which time they had a daughter, Charlotte. If Birkin was gauche, Gainsbourg was louche - and often outrageous. He liked to light 500-franc notes on television, and had a Rolls Royce which he used as an ashtray. This may have been fun to watch, but it wasn't, clearly, so great to live with. In 1981 Birkin left Gainsbourg for the director and auteur, Jacques Doillon, by whom she was already pregnant with her youngest daughter, Lou. Not the sort of family set-up textbooks might recommend, perhaps. But her three daughters are forging highly successful careers: Charlotte Gainsbourg won an Oscar at the age of 14 and goes from strength to strength as an actress; Lou Doillon "sneaked off and did a screen test" at 15 and hasn't looked back since; and Kate Barry is a talented photographer. Birkin - to judge by the way she talks about them, and about her grandchildren - is as proud as punch.
"I used to pop round to Lou's when I was in a panic about doing a play I didn't want to do," she says. "I get myself into such a twist and she is normally a very calming influence. And when Charlotte read Boxes she rang me up and sent the sweetest text, which I've written into my diary. Kate did the cover of Rendez-Vous. So if anything, my girls egg me on."
Armed with her experience of show- business, however, she egged them on, too.
"I didn't want them to look like I did in La Piscine, all make-up and Swinging Sixties style," she says. "I think probably when you make yourself up to that extent you have very low self-esteem. For me it took about 10 years and a great deal of . . . well, not a great deal of confidence, because I haven't got that much even now. But I wanted Charlotte and Lou to make films where their real faces showed straight away."
Looking back over her extraordinary life can she say, in true chanteuse style, je ne regrette rien? Does she, for example, regret making Je T'Aime: Moi Non Plus?
"I think I've probably had periods when I regretted it," she says. One of those periods was when, after Gainsbourg's death in 1991, she returned to England to stage a tribute concert in his memory. Her mother alerted her to the fact that the tickets weren't selling - hence the aforementioned screaming match in Moscow - so she organised some interviews.
"One of the gentlemen of the press, from one of the most sordid English newspapers, said: 'Have you made any other dirty records, Jane?' I thought, how can I explain that when Serge Gainsbourg died he had people from six years old to 80 years old in the graveyard," she says. "I realised that nobody in England knew who I was, and that was OK. But nobody knew who Serge was either.
"Instead of crying, I went back to France and I rang up every single person who was well-known to me, and who the English couldn't possibly have not known. I rang up St Laurent; I rang up Zizi Jeanmaire; I rang up Roland Petit. I rang up Bardot, I rang up Claudia Cardinale, I rang up Jean-Luc Godard. I rang up Mitterrand, Jacques Laing, Chirac, who was the mayor of Paris then. I rang people from every tendency and every art that I could think of, and asked them to give a definition of Serge in two lines that I could translate into English underneath. By the following day they started to come through my fax machine - and we watched with wonder as we saw Jacques Chirac writing: 'We've lost our Baudelaire, our Apollinaire.' "
Birkin returned to England and put on a defiant show, using the tribute material.
"After that I can only think of Je T'Aime: Moi Non Plus as a calling card," she says. "If I've been to Hong Kong and Jakarta and Sao Paolo, every single time it's because of Je T'Aime: Moi Non Plus. If we surprise people when we do Arabesque, then all the better. But I think of Je T'Aime: Moi Non Plus as my visiting card. It will also be my end card, in that I know very well what they'll put on the television when I go out feet first.
"And" - there is an uncharacteristic pause, then a light laugh - "it's quite nice to know the melody."
There will be a public interview with Jane Birkin as part of Saturday's screening of Mariées Mais Pas Trop at 4 p.m. at the Irish Film Institute, Dublin. The Arabesque show is at Liberty Hall Theatre, Dublin, on Sunday at 8 p.m. (tickets: €30)
