Jane Birkin has died at 76 following health concerns that forced the musician to cancel a series of concerts in May, per a report from Le Parisien.
The British icon—who spent the majority of her time in France and had a major influence on French style and culture—rose to fame as an actor, starring in films such as La Piscine (1969) and Death on the Nile (1978), earning three Cèsar Award nominations throughout her decades-long film career. Birkin was also known for pushing boundaries, with her breathy vocals on Serge Gainsbourg's hit 1969 duet “Je T’Aime…Moi Non Plus,” which caused enough controversy that the song was banned from the radio in multiple countries and denounced by the Vatican.
“We never thought for a moment that the song would become such a symbol of freedom—all over the world,” Birkin told Vogue France in 2018. “People listened to it in secret, from Spain to Argentina.”
Aside from her illustrious career as a singer and actor, Birkin was revered as a ’60s and ’70s style icon for her breezy French aesthetic and was eventually immortalized as the inspiration behind the coveted Hèrmes Birkin bag. “I was on an airplane when a plastic bag holding all my things broke and everything fell out—my date book, papers, everything,” Birkin told T: The New York Times Style Magazine in 2010. “Just as I was saying how I wish Hermès would make a bag that could fit all my things, the man sitting next to me happened to work for Hermès—it was Jean-Louis Dumas, the head designer!”
She continued, "They already had the Kelly bag, named after Grace Kelly, so he began work on the Birkin bag. I went down to the atelier and he had made it in cardboard. And we talked about it and I said they should make some changes, like making pockets bigger. And that’s how it was made.” However, Birkin asked to have her name removed from the bag in 2015 after the animal rights group PETA published an exposé on crocodile farms.
Jane Birkin is survived by two daughters, Charlotte Lucy Gainsbourg and Lou Doillon. Her daughter Kate Barry died in December 2013. Prior to her own death, Birkin was appointed to the OBE (Order of the British Empire) in 2001 and received the French Ordre National du Mérite in 2004 and 2015.
