From the composer John Barry, whom she married young, to her legendary couple with Serge Gainsbourg, a look back at the love stories that marked the life of Jane Birkin.
Jane Birkin was under 20 when she married composer John Barry, 13 years her senior. Pianist and jazz trumpeter, he composed and arranged the music for a hundred films, including several James Bond. From this union, which had angered her father, a daughter was born: photographer Kate Barry, who died tragically in 2013. She left him two years after marriage, with the desire to live a full life and start a career in France. “I love John, that’s why I find it so hard to tell him he’s married to a sex maniac. (…) How I would like to stop thinking about sex, but I am only 20 years old and I only did it for two years, including one year during which I was pregnant”, she had told in her Munkey Diaries memoir, published in 2018.
After filing for divorce, Jane Birkin leaves England to try her luck in Paris. This is where she meets Serge Gainsbourg, freshly dumped by Brigitte Bardot. Begins a tortured and passionate relationship that will last twelve years between the two artists, who are more than 15 years apart. Quickly, the couple fascinated by their charisma and their taste for scandals. In 1971, their daughter Charlotte was born. Tired of Serge’s excesses, unfaithful and alcoholic, she left him in 1980. The separation was rapid, almost brutal, radical. Gainsbourg saw the breakup badly. He will tell the press: “I had a golden girl, but she got away with it.”
The same year of her breakup with Serge Gainsbourg, she began a romance with the filmmaker Jacques Doillon. From this relationship, which will last 12 years, is born Lou, his third daughter. But the figure of Serge Gainsbourg will weigh on the couple as she relates in her memoirs. “I know that whatever I do, I will never be happy without Serge. (…) Is it even possible to live with three? (…) We talked about that last night. We had dinner together and I was so happy with Jacques and Serge. (…) And if Serge could love Jacques, even if they both left, I wouldn’t be sad since they would be together, and I know they would be happy”.
After breaking up with Jacques Doillon, she became friends with the writer Olivier Rolin, whom she met during a humanitarian trip to Chechnya. Of this discreet personality, little present in the media, she recounts in 2008 in the columns of Elle magazine having nicknamed him “Tiger”. “He’s a nice guy. I think he would cross the planet to help me if I was in trouble, even today,” she added. In the columns of Liberation, in 2013, she had confessed: “I said to myself: ‘Olivier will be my last love.'”
