the times | Friday December 11 2020 1GT 5
cover story
what he thought. If on top of it he
was plastered, even more so.”
She is just as quick to defend Lemon
Incest (Un zeste de citron), the duet
Gainsbourg sang with Charlotte,
then 13, whose video featured father
and daughter lying on a bed. “I think
the point with Lemon Incest was that
he wanted to put Charlotte on a
pedestal, but he was a very shy
man,” Birkin says.
Houston would have begged to
differ about the shyness. “He could
never take anyone in his arms like
some fathers do. His way of saying
things was to write as beautiful a song
as he could about how he loved her.
He couldn’t resist the temptation of
making a pun between ‘incest’ and
‘zest’. He perfectly well knew thatcrisply. “Someone told me about it
and I thought, ‘Oh well, she must be
very bitter about something.’ I know
perfectly well that he wasn’t that sort
of person. Charlotte mentioned it the
other day and I thought, ‘Argh!’ ”
How about the time in 1986 when
a visibly drunk Gainsbourg appeared
with Whitney Houston on a French
chat show and announced that he
wanted “to f***” her? Was he just
winding everyone up? “No, I think he
was saying exactly what he thought,”
Birkin says with a laugh. It would
constitute harassment now, though.
“You can’t judge things by other
epoques, you can’t measure them by
this extraordinary state that Me Too
has made. He was a very honest man,
so he had a tendency to say exactly
There was a passage in her diaries
that she hesitated about including,
an “absolute rave about jealousy” in
which she imagined herself as “a plant
that should be cut down otherwise it
will climb up the wall to his bedroom
and he’ll find it round his neck. I
thought, ‘Good grief, people will think
I’m barking’.” Who was the “he”? The
passage was undated so she is not sure,
but “it definitely wasn’t Serge”, she
says. She presumes it was Jacques
Doillon, the director with whom she
had a third daughter, Lou, an actress,
singer and model. That relationship
is rumoured to have ended because
Birkin was not over Gainsbourg.
She certainly talks about him more
warmly than any of her other exes.
Birkin insists that “at the moment
I have passions about my children
and my bulldog and my brother and
sisters and my friends”. The desperate
romantic is still there, though. You just
have to listen to her talk about the
“nostalgia you have when you see
people kissing furtively in garage
doors. The passion you can see in
young people, the kind of passion that
means you don’t even have time to
take your coat off. It’s not yours any
more — it lasts for such a short time.
But you want to cry out because you
had it, you knew what it’s like.”
Oh! Pardon tu dormais is out now
on Blue Wrasseit would shock people but that was
secondary, in a way.”
Nor will Birkin have anything
said about the country of her birth,
despite her sadness over Brexit.
“People have always been the
salvation in England,” she says. “If
you fall over, someone’s very likely
to pick you up. That side of England
hasn’t changed.” When she comes
to London, “I don’t even dare walk
down the street where my mother
lived because I miss her too much.
But that doesn’t matter. I just go to
South Kensington, which has a lot
of French people in it.”
While many on this side of the
Channel cast envious glances towards
Emmanuel Macron, opinion is volatile
about him in France, she says. “One
minute they love people and the next
they’re screaming for the guillotine.
The English seem to be liking their
leader a lot better than the French.”
I’m not sure that last bit is true.
Does Birkin have a partner at the
moment? “Thank goodness no!” she
says with a chuckle.
Is that how she prefers it? “I don’t
prefer it that way, but I have to note it
doesn’t bring out the very best of me.
The angst that brings, of being in love
with someone and therefore fury that
you won’t be able to keep it up. It’s
really a relief not to have that sort of
passion any more.”COVER: ALAIN DEJEAN/GETTY IMAGES. BELOW: REX FEATURES, GAMMA-RAPHO/GETTY; SYSPEO.C/UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP/GETTYLes rosbifs en France: five
Francophile British artists
George Orwell
A fluent French
speaker, Orwell
moved to Paris
in 1928, following
a well-trodden
literary path taken
by anglophone
writers including
James Joyce, Ernest
Hemingway and
F Scott Fitzgerald.
His first piece as a
professional writer,
“La Censure
en Angleterre”
(Censorship in
England), was
published in the
French magazine
Monde, and his
experiences of poverty
and working as a
plongeur (washer-up)
fed into his first book,
Down and Out in Paris
and London.Paul McCartney
In 1965 McCartney
asked Jan Vaughan,
a French teacher
and the wife of his
childhood friend Ivan
Vaughan, to help with
the French section in
his song Michelle:
“Michelle, ma belle,
sont des mots qui vonttrès bien ensemble”
(Michelle, my
beautiful, are words
that go very well
together). Not quite
Molière, but it went
down a storm.Charlotte Rampling
The Essex-born
actress has lived and
worked in Paris for
much of her adult life.
A muse to the director
François Ozon and
the fashion designer
Yves Saint Laurent,
Rampling was married
to the French
musician Jean-Michel
Jarre for almost
20 years. She won an
honorary César — a
French Oscar — in
2001 and has fourmore nominations for
films including Ozon’s
Swimming Pool.Kristin Scott
Thomas
Born in Cornwall
and raised in
Dorset, the actress,
left, has lived in
France since she
was 19, becoming a
respected performer
on screen and stage
there. Scott Thomas
has been nominated
for three Césars — for
Il y a longtemps que je
t’aime (2008), Partir
(2009) and Elle
s’appelait Sarah (2010)
— and in 2005 was
named a chevalier of
the Légion d’honneur.Eddie Izzard
The cosmopolitan
comedian, a staunch
supporter of the EU,
has always been fond
of a linguistic gag and
did his first stand-up
routine in French in- He has since
toured the country,
and performed
routines in German,
Spanish, Russian
and Arabic. EP
say anything about her death’
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