Describing Jane Birkin an icon is a given. The British-born actress and singer appeared in countless films, wrote several albums worth of songs, acted on stage, and threw herself in political and social activism. Birkin passed away earlier this year at the age of 76, but she will forever be an inspiration.
Read MoreThrowback on the interviews we did with the #ToastToFreedom artists for Amnesty International..
Here is #JaneBirkin :
"People have far more power if only they know it. I have always believed that if millions of people sent letters that chockablock the front doors of some ministers, some presidents, and just by the sheer weight of the letters, of the appeals, then they would have to look."
Jane Birkin graced the front pages of most French newspapers on Monday as France mourned the death of the late British actress and singer who enjoyed icon status in the country that she had called home since the late 1960s. “Our tears can’t change anything,” proclaimed Le Parisien newspaper, which first broke the news of Birkin’s death at the age of 76 on Sunday. Libération ran with the simple headline “Without Jane”, while regional newspaper Le Maine Libre referred to the late actress as “The Eternal English Bride of France”.
Read MoreRest in peace, Jane Birkin. We were so honoured to have you part of Amnesty’s Toast to Freedom.
“France’s favourite “petite Anglaise”, the British-born singer and actor Jane Birkin, has died at her home in Paris aged 76. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, paid tribute to Birkin, saying she “embodied freedom and sang the most beautiful words in our language”.
Read MoreMs. Birkin released “Oh! Pardon tu dormais…,” her first album of her own songs written in English, in 2021. “The results are an emotional tour de force from an artist who has never gotten her musical due outside of France,” the music writer Ben Cardew wrote in a review for Pitchfork. Ms. Birkin also continued to act, including in films by Agnès Varda and plays by Patrice Chéreau. She was also popular in France as an activist for women’s and L.G.B.T.Q. rights as well as for her British accent when speaking French, which the French found endearing. “The most Parisian of the English has left us,” the mayor of Paris wrote.
Read MoreThe Anglo-French singer’s new album is her most personal to date. She talks about her complicated relationship with her mother – and the echoes in her bonds with her own children. On her recent album, Oh! Pardon tu dormais… it is at its finest. Collaborating with Étienne Daho and Jean-Louis Pierot, she found a way to write and sing some of the most personal songs of her career, filling them with wit and pain and beauty. “Funnily enough singing in English, one’s so at ease,” she says. “It’s so lovely when it’s your own words.”
Read MoreDespite forging her own way as a successful actor and singer, acclaimed for her collaborations with Lars von Trier, Charlotte Gainsbourg has been compared to her father Serge and mom Jane Birkin all her life, she says. In directorial debut “Jane by Charlotte,” she comes back to the subject on her own terms. Shown at the Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival this week following its Cannes premiere, the film is sold internationally by The Party Film Sales.
Read MoreAt 50, Charlotte Gainsbourg is the custodian of the memory of her family and their mark on French popular culture.
Read MoreFrom her early years as being described as a “shy English girl” Jane Birkin certainly came out of her shell. Although she may bemoan her own rise to stardom as bleakly gradual, the retrospective history books have her earmarked as the quintessential feather ruffler since the moment that she first graced screens in The Knack …and How to Get It in 1965. She might have only starred as ‘Girl on Motorbike’ in that, but soon she was a paradigm for the daring European art re-emerging in the 1960s.
Read MoreEarlier this year, Serge Gainsbourg’s widow and collaborator Jane Birkin released Birkin/Gainsbourg: Le Symphonique, a collection of symphonic arrangements of some of Gainsbourg’s iconic works. Now, it’s been announced that Birkin will take the stage at Carnegie Hall in New York City with the Wordless Music Orchestra on February 1 to perform songs off the album and more.
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