Jane Birkin, who assisted determine chic feminine sexuality of the 1970s as an actress in arty and erotic European movies and in her connection — equivalent elements passionate and inventive — with the singer Serge Gainsbourg, died on Sunday in Paris. Ms. Birkin, who later on turned identified for inspiring a single of the most effective acknowledged strains of luxury purses, was 76.
Her death was verified by President Emmanuel Macron of France, who named her “a French icon” in a message on Twitter. The French news media reported that Ms. Birkin had been identified dead at her home but that the lead to was not immediately recognized.
The boy or girl of a famously attractive actress and a socially related British naval officer, Ms. Birkin led a existence guided by numerous pleased mishaps.
While she was on a flight in 1984, a plastic bag in which she was retaining her possessions broke, main her to complain aloud that Hermès did not make a bag that could in shape all her points. The male sitting following to her transpired to be Jean-Louis Dumas, then the head designer of Hermès (and later its chief govt). The organization launched the Birkin bag line the exact same yr — in just the massive dimension she had asked for.
Typical Birkin bags now offer for $10,000, and the difficulties of getting a single — provided a sophisticated manufacturing process and a intentionally rationed source to boutiques — have given the bag the cachet of exclusivity.
Her marriage with Mr. Gainsbourg started just as fortuitously, in 1968. She was in her early 20s, her initial marriage owning fallen apart, when, without having unique renown as an actress and without speaking a word of French, she managed to be solid in a French movie, “Slogan,” starring Mr. Gainsbourg.
The two fell in adore, but Ms. Birkin did not see a way to stay prolonged in France. Then, dining out 1 night, she had a possibility come across with the French director Jacques Deray, acquired hired to act in a movie of his, stayed in the country and solidified her romantic relationship with Mr. Gainsbourg.
She lived in France for the rest of her everyday living, and her engagement with Mr. Gainsbourg and his music proved similarly enduring.
The most noteworthy merchandise of their collaboration and romance was their 1969 strike recording of Mr. Gainsbourg’s song “Je t’aime… moi non plus” (“I Enjoy You… Me Neither”).
In the song, a duet, Mr. Gainsbourg speaks of sex in a minimal, conversational voice as Ms. Birkin confesses her appreciate in suggestive murmurs and moans and the high-pitched singing of an ingénue.
The track was condemned by the Vatican and banned in numerous nations around the world and by the B.B.C. tv community. But it marketed thousands and thousands of copies.
Almost 50 a long time later, in 2018, Ms. Birkin was nevertheless singing new music by Mr. Gainsbourg, by then on a environment tour of orchestral versions of his songs.
“If I am singing in Argentina in two weeks’ time,” she instructed The Guardian, “it is mainly because of ‘Je t’aime.’”
Jane Mallory Birkin was born in London on Dec. 14, 1946, to Judy Campbell, an actress who attained renown for undertaking for British troops with Noël Coward throughout Earth War II, and Cmdr. David Birkin of the Royal Navy.
In 2021, her father’s exploits during World War II were being recounted in “A Hazardous Organization,” a book by Tim Spicer, a former British navy officer. Commander Birkin’s obligations included navigating boats on moonless nights across the English Channel to convey to basic safety Allied spies, stranded airmen and escaped prisoners of war who experienced found themselves in France.
Ms. Birkin, at 18, married the British composer John Barry, recognised for arranging the trademark theme to James Bond flicks, and they experienced a daughter, Kate. At 20, Ms. Birkin appeared in Michelangelo Antonioni’s hit 1966 film, “Blow Up,” an erotic tale of a London manner photographer. She performed a style model — the credits stated her as only The Blonde — and obtained some interest for a risqué nude scene.
“Had it all worked out with John Barry, I would never have been curious to know what was heading on any where else,” Ms. Birkin told The Guardian in 2017. “I would have just gone on currently being his spouse. I would have been delighted. But for the reason that he went off with another person else, and I was remaining with Kate, I experienced to discover a task fairly fast.”
That led to her audition for “Slogan.”
The movie that held her in France was “La Piscine” (“The Swimming Pool”), starring Alain Delon and Romy Schneider. (It located unanticipated renewed reputation in the United States in 2021.) A sunlight-soaked movie of intercourse and jealousy with many pictures of scantily clad actors, the film proved to be an powerful showcase for Ms. Birkin’s very long-limbed elegance.
Her romance with Mr. Gainsbourg captivated the French community. She was the young doe-eyed expat, he the aging but even now virile inventive genius. The relationship lasted for additional than a ten years, ending when she remaining him in the early 1980s for the French movie director Jacques Doillon. Mr. Gainsbourg died in 1991 at 62.
While Ms. Birkin would later on converse self-deprecatingly about her function as Mr. Gainsbourg’s muse, she embraced getting “the keeper of the Gainsbourg flame,” as The New York Moments labeled her in 2018.
She explained to The Periods connections in between the audio he wrote for her and operate by classical composers like Chopin and Brahms.
“I would have thought that he was almost certainly France’s most modern day author,” she mentioned. “He invented a new language, he cut words in two like Cole Porter.”
Ms. Birkin produced “Oh! Pardon tu dormais…,” her 1st album of her very own tracks created in English, in 2021. “The effects are an psychological tour de power from an artist who has hardly ever gotten her musical owing exterior of France,” the music writer Ben Cardew wrote in a assessment for Pitchfork.
Ms. Birkin also ongoing to act, like in films by Agnès Varda and performs by Patrice Chéreau. She was also well-liked in France as an activist for women’s and L.G.B.T.Q. legal rights as well as for her British accent when speaking French, which the French discovered endearing.
“The most Parisian of the English has left us,” the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, wrote in a concept on Twitter on Sunday. “We will by no means overlook her tracks, her laughs and her incomparable accent.”
Ms. Birkin experienced a mild stroke in 2021 and had just lately canceled a collection of live shows simply because of wellbeing challenges.
She is survived by two daughters, just one with Mr. Gainsbourg and the other with Mr. Doillon: the singer-actresses Charlotte Gainsbourg and Lou Doillon, every of whom has, like their mother, encouraged designers and followers of manner. Her other daughter, Kate Barry, a photographer, died at 46 in 2013 in a drop from a window of her fourth-floor Paris condominium.
Ms. Birkin found out that her intimate separation from Mr. Gainsbourg did not dim their collaboration. He stored writing new tracks supposed for her right until he died.
After their break up, “you could speak back again to him for at the time,” she advised The Guardian. “You were being not just his creation any more.”
Guy Trebay contributed reporting from New York.