European Actors Archives - Page 7 of 29

Liv Ullmann

TCM overview:

Possessing one of the most expressive faces in cinema history, Liv Ullmann will forever be associated with the work of her mentor Ingmar Bergman. She was his muse, his female alter ego inspiring him to look deeply into himself. More than any other Bergman actress, she embodied his core themes of anguish, loss and failure, and the nine films they made over 12 years represent the director at his peak, exploring his most private concerns. Throughout their collaboration, Bergman photographed Ullmann extensively in close-up, trusting her honesty completely, and the camera’s proximity never intimidated the superb parade of emotions emanating from her luminous blue eyes and softly rounded features. Their professional life survived the dissolution of their private life, and years after she played her last role for him, Bergman asked her to interpret his autobiographical screenplay “Private Confessions” (1997) and allowed her to put her personal stamp on it as director, adding a new dynamic to their artistic relationship.

Born to Norwegian parents in Japan, Ullmann moved from Tokyo to Toronto, Canada at the outbreak of World War II and then to Norway following her father’s death. She acquired eight months of acting training in London prior to making her stage debut in a Norwegian production of “The Diary of Anne Frank” (1957) and also appeared in her first film (“Fools in the Mountains”) that year. She followed her success in the provinces with success in the capital city of Oslo, becoming a member of the Norwegian National Theatre Company, and continued acting in Norwegian films until Bergman introduced her to a wider audience in “Persona” (1966), the director’s landmark take on reality versus art and the larger issues of life and death. Chosen for her remarkable resemblance to co-star Bibi Andersson, Ullmann played an actress whose breakdown has made her mute, and Andersson was the voluble nurse trying to coax her to speak again. Without words, she relied solely on facial and body gestures to tell her tale of alienation, and the lack of text was far from limiting as her questioning, sometimes impenetrable looks poignantly projected her traumatized rejection of the world. And yet . . . her silence becomes a form of power. In the movie’s most famous shot, the women’s faces fuse into one, symbolizing Andersson’s incorporation into the now stronger Ullmann.

While mentor and muse fought their demons as best they could, their art flourished with “Hour of the Wolf” (her first film with actors Max von Sydow and Erland Josephson) and “Shame” (both 1968) and “The Passion of Anna” (1970). The collaboration continued long after the actress had packed up and returned to Norway with their child, perhaps reaching its fullest flowering in “Scenes From a Marriage” (1973), a passionate, probing look into the disintegration of a marriage and the relationship that follows. Ullmann and Josephson were outstanding as the couple in this intimate, often painful slice of art imitating life, originally made as six 50-minute TV episodes and edited into feature-length by writer-director Bergman. She also enjoyed great success during this period in two films directed by Jan Troell, “The Emigrants” (1971) and its sequel “The New Land” (1973), earning the first of two Best Actress Oscar nominations for the former. The films told the tale of Ullmann, husband von Sydow and fellow Swedes who fled their famine-ravaged homeland in the mid-1800s to try their luck in America. She and von Sydow would return to the same era later for “The Ox” (1991), the directorial debut of longtime Bergman cinematographer Sven Nykvist, only this time portraying the plight of those who stayed behind.

Ullmann earned her second Best Actress Academy Award nomination for Bergman’s “Face to Face” (1976), but their association was winding down. Only “The Serpent’s Egg” (1977) and “Autumn Sonata” (1978) remained, although she has expressed regret at not acting in his swan song “Fanny and Alexander” (1983), her refusal angering him greatly at the time. By then, she had made her Broadway debut in “A Doll’s House” (1975) and returned to the Great White Way as Eugene O’Neill’s “Anna Christie” in 1977, a part fellow Scandinavian Greta Garbo had played in the 1930 film. Later that year, she also published the first installment of her autobiography, “Changes”, and was the subject of a documentary (“A Look at Liv”). At the height of her worldwide popularity, she even made her Broadway musical debut in the Richard Rodgers-Martin Charnin adaptation of “I Remember Mama” (1979), an experience that perhaps eased the embarrassment of warbling Bacharach-David in her disastrous American feature debut, the 1973 musical remake of “Lost Horizon”. In 1980, she began her long-standing association with UNICEF as its goodwill ambassador and two years later was back on Broadway as Mrs. Alving in Ibsen’s “Ghosts”.

Ullmann made a smooth transition to middle-aged roles, and two of her more notable films of the 80s were “Gaby–A True Story” (1987, as the wealthy mother of a girl who becomes a celebrated writer despite her severe cerebral palsy) and “The Rose Garden” (1989, defending Maximillian Schell against charges of having been a Nazi). She also began a second career as a director and screenwriter with the “Parting” segment of the anthology feature “Love” (1981) and in the 90s devoted increasing time to this new passion, starting with her feature debut, “Sofie” (1992), the story of a young Jew in 19th Century Copenhagen. She enlisted Nykvist as her cameraman for her sophomore effort, “Kristin Lavransdatter” (1995), an adaptation of Sigrid Undset’s epic novel of 14th Century Norway, and had him back on board for “Private Confessions” (1997). Though her filmmaking style owes much to Bergman (she too favors the close-up), “Private Confessions” (despite being shot by Nykvist) does not especially look like a Bergman film. Screenwriter and director argued over a few things in the rough cut, but in the end he embraced her choices, which included playing up the religious angle a bit more than he might have. Obviously their reteaming was tonic for both, and Ullmann embarked on her second interpretation of Bergman at the helm of his autobiographical “Faithless” (2000).

The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

Katina Paxinou TCM Overview

TCM overview:

One of Greece’s most beloved and respected actresses, Katina Paxinou had a brief but illustrious career in American films of the 1940s. Paxinou was born in Piraeus, an Athenian seaport, but studied theater and opera in Switzerland. She made her debut singing in the Mitropoulis Opera in Athens (1920), then became a legit actress in ’29. While working at the Greek National Theater, she met (and later married) actor/director Alexis Minotis. The two co-starred in and co-directed many productions, becoming known as Greece’s Lunt and Fontanne. Thei

r repertory included Shakespeare, Ibsen, O’Neill and classical Greek drama (Paxinou herself translated many scripts into modern Greek and wrote musical scores for several).

With the onset of World War Two, she found herself stranded in London, unable to return to her home. She fled to the US, making her Broadway debut in “Hedda Gabler” (1942). She next appeared in the film “For Whom the Bell Tolls” (1943), as a peasant woman caught in the Spanish Civil War, and won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her work. She made another four films in the US: “Hostages” (1943), “Confidential Agent” (1945), “Mourning Becomes Electra” (1947), and “Prince of Foxes” (1949) before returning to Greece.

Paxinou’s stage career continued where she’d left off.
She and her husband rejoined the National Theater and eventually opened their own Royal Theater in Athens.
They toured the world in revivals of Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides. She made a handful of films in various countries, including Spain (“Mr. Arkadin”, 1955), the US (“The Miracle”, 1959), Italy (“Rocco e i suoi Fratelli”, 1960), and France (“The Trial”, 1962, “Aunt Zita”, 1967, and “Un Ete sauvage”, 1970). Paxinou was still acting alongside her husband at the time of her death

Tilly Losch

“Streetswing” article:

Tilly Losch was an established dancer and actress, she was titled the ‘Countess of Carnarvon.’ Danced in many children’s parts in all repertory ballets and Operas. She studied her dancing at the Vienna Imperial Opera ballet school at the age of six. Tilly became a full member of the ballet corps at the unusually young age of fifteen. She also studied modern dance with Grete Wiesenthal and Mary Wigman.

Tilly made her professional debut in Vienna Waltzes and her first dramatic role was in ‘Leonce and Lena’ at Vienna’s Burg theater. Her first solo appearance was at the Opern Theatre in Vienna in the 5/9/1924 ballet ‘Schlagobers,’ and by the time she was twenty was one of Vienna’s most popular dancers. Made her London debut with ‘This Year of Grace’ in 1928.

Losch stayed with the Vienna Opera untill she came to the U.S. (1927/1928) and gave various dance recitals in Central Europe. She met Harold Kreutzberg that same summer and would work for him many times. Later she meet George Ballanchine and danced as a Ballerina in his 1933 Balle.

. Also danced with Fred Astaire but she was never the exhibitionist, she was always shy, on-stage and off. Tilly’s first marriage ended in divorce due to numerous infidelities on her part.

Following a bout of depression, Tilly discontinued her dancing career, but soon felt the need for expression in another artistic medium. Having first tried her hand at watercolors, she began to paint seriously. The first one-person exhibition of her paintings, held at New York’s Bignou Gallery in the spring of 1944. Tilly’s second marriage was to the son of the world famous discoverer of King Tutankhamen’s tomb, Earl of Carnarvon and almost overnight became Lady Carnarvon, an English Countess.

While in New York in 1975 She died from cancer.

Te above “Streetswing” article can also be accessed online here.

Leonid Kinskey

Tom Vallance’s “Independent” obituary:

ONE OF Hollywood’s most distinctive character actors, often known as “The Mad Russian”, Leonid Kinskey was a lanky, shock-haired eccentric with a wrinkled brow and wide grin who specialised in comic continentals with fractured English and manic enthusiasm. Among his most memorable portrayals were the barman who effusively kisses Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, the gigolo who takes Betty Grable on the town in Down Argentine Way and one of the unworldly professors in Ball of Fire. Occasionally he would be cast in less genial roles, and was chillingly effective as the oily informer in Algiers and a snivelling coward in So Ends Our Night.

Though his countrymen often assumed that he was American (“When I played Russians in the movies they made me so exaggerated no real Russian would believe me”), Kinskey was actually born in St Petersburg in 1903. Sent out of Russia by his mother at 17 – “I belonged to a group of people that was not wanted after the Revolution” – he toured South America as a mime with the acclaimed Firebird Theatre, which specialised in bringing famous paintings to life through mime and dance.

When the company flopped in New York, Kinskey found himself stranded with no money or knowledge of English. He worked as a waiter in Manhattan then managed to get a role in a silent film, The Great Deception (1926), starring Aileen Pringle and Ben Lyon, but when most of his part was cut out he found work in Chicago running a theatre-restaurant with a Russian theme. After the stock market crash caused the restaurant to close, Al Jolson hired Kinskey to appear in the touring version of his show Wonder Bar.

While it was playing in Hollywood, Kinskey was spotted by the director Ernst Lubitsch, who signed him for a brief cameo as a Russian peasant in the exquisite comedy Trouble in Paradise (1932). It was an exaggerated portrayal of an agitated radical who repeatedly exclaims “Phooey” to socialite Kay Francis, who is reassured by her lover Herbert Marshall that “his phooey is less than his bite”, and it set the pattern for many of his later roles caricaturing foreigners, such as his delightfully eccentric composer in On Your Toes (1939).

His own favourite role was in the Bing Crosby musical Rhythm on the Range (1936) in which Kinskey bizarrely took part in introducing the song standard, “I’m An Old Cowhand”. Other films in which he featured include Duck Soup (1933), We Live Again (1934, another serious role as a murder victim), Les Miserables (1935), The Merry Widow (1935), 100 Men and a Girl (1937), The Great Waltz (1938), Flirting with Fate (1938), in which he and comic Joe F. Brown duetted on “Sweet Adeline”), That Night in Rio (1941) and Can’t Help Singing (1944), in which he was one of a pair of bumbling confidence tricksters attempting to swindle Deanna Durbin.

Kinskey was one of the last surviving members of the cast of the enduring classic Casablanca (1942). He claimed that Bogart got him the role of Sacha the bartender after the original actor Leon Mostovoy was fired for lacking the requisite humour. “We used to drink together, Bogart, Ralph Bellamy and myself at Mischa Auer’s house at least three times a week,” said Kinskey:

We were all good drinkers. Ralph Bellamy was a good-looking guy. We thought he was the one who was going to be a star. And I said to myself about Bogart, “He’s short, he speaks with a lisp. And he’s not a good- looking guy so what chance does he have?” When Bogart asked me to be in Casablanca, I knew I was replacing an actor who had been thought too heavy, speechwise, and they wanted something very light.

In a memorable scene Kinskey as Sacha is so moved by Bogart’s arranging a passport for a young couple desperate to leave that he kisses Bogart on both cheeks as he exclaims, “Boss, you did a wonderful thing” to which Bogart responds, “Get away from me!”

Kinskey appeared in over 70 films. He supplemented his income by writing articles and short stories for Russian publications. During the Second World War he worked with the Soviets in choosing Hollywood movies for showing in the USSR. A television show he did in 1948 called The Spotlight Club is allegedly the first situation comedy ever on television.

Kinskey was also a regular on Jackie Cooper’s television series The People’s Choice in the Fifties, and made appearances on the shows of Ann Sothern, Spike Jones and others, but he refused to do commercials. A man of strong principles, he was featured in the pilot of Hogan’s Heroes, a comedy series about the Second World War, but declined to sign for the series, stating, “The premise was to me both false and offensive. Nazis were seldom dumb and never funny.”

Kinskey married his late wife Iphigenia Castiglioni four times. “It started in Mexico City,” said Kinskey, “and then over 20 years of our happy marriage we celebrated every five years by taking a new marriage licence in a different country.” Castiglioni, a Viennese beauty who died in 1963, was also in movies – she played Empress Eugenie in both The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936) and Maytime (1937) and was the Bird Woman in Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954).

When movie roles dried up (his last was in Glory, 1956), Kinskey wrote and directed industrial films for major corporations. “To dramatise a machine or product requires a great deal more ingenuity to keep it going than a well-written scene played by able actors,” he stated. The man whom columnist Louella Parsons once called “the maddest Russian on land or sea” also frequently travelled to Palm Springs to visit old friends from Hollywood’s Russian colony.

Tom Vallance

Leonid Kinskey, actor: born St Petersburg, Russia 18 April 1903; married three times, first Iphigenia Castiglioni (died 1963), third Tina York; died Fountain Hills, Arizona 8 September 1998.

The above “Independent” obituary can also be accessed online here.

Dany Saval is a French actress (born in Paris in 1942)who went to Hollywood in the early 1960’s and made such movies there as “Moon Pilot” with Tom Tryon and “Boeing, Boeing”. She returned to French film making in the mid 1960’s.

IMDB entry:

Boeing, Boeing (1965), L’animal (1977) and A Mouse with the Men (1964). She has been married to Michel Drucker since 1972. She was previously married to Maurice Jarre and Roger Chaland. Lithe and lovely French leading lady of the late 50s and 60s in both fluffy comedy and intrigue. Best known in America as one of a trio of lovely airline stewardesses being shuffled around by Tony Curtis and Jerry Lewis in the slapstick comedy Boeing, Boeing(1965). Mother of Stéfanie Jarre. Ex-stepmother of Jean-Michel Jarre and Kevin Jarre.

IMDB entry:

A former matinee idol in Holland and Germany, he fled to America before WWII and portrayed anti-Nazi patriots and continental romancers in Hollywood. Forced to retire after suffering an injury while on stage in Holland 1955, he lived out the rest of his life in relative seclusion. Dogged by ill health (phlebitis) in post-war years, he suffered the first of a series of heart attacks in 1945.

– IMDb Mini Biography By: burrell_dale

New York Times obituary in 1975:

LOS ANGELES, May 9 (AP) —Philip Dorn, handsome, deep‐voiced leading man in films from 1939 to 1953, died today at the Motion Picture Country House and Hospital. He was 75 years old.

Mr. Dorn, who was born in the Netherlands, died of a heart attack, but he had been incapacitated for nearly 10 years after a head injury on stage in Europe. He began acting at the age of 14 and came to this country in 1939.

He appeared in such films as “Ski Patrol,” “Paris After Dark,” “Love You,” “Sealed Cargo,” “Tarzan’s Secret Treasure,” “Calling Dr. Gillespie” and “Random Harvest.”

Surviving are his widow, Marianne; and a daughter, Femia Laurey of Encino.

Opposite Irene Dunne

Mr. Dorn was a well‐known stage actor in the Netherlands, appearing in “Camille,” “Ghosts.” “Journey’s End” and other plays.

One of his most successful films was “I Remember Mama,” in which he played Papa to Irene Dunne’s Mama. Others included “The Fighting Kentuckian,” in support of John Wayne; “Gaunt Woman,” about submarine warfare; “Spy Hunt” and “Blonde Fever.”

In his career in the Netherlands, Mr. Dorn toured the Dutch colonies for four years and once traveled 16,000 miles with a company of Dutch players to perform in repertory for amusement‐starved plantation owners in Java. He was a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture in The Hague.

Francesco Quinn obituary in “The Los Angeles Times” in 2011.

Francesco Quinn the actor son of movie legend Anthony Quinn, had a promising debut with a supporting role in the Oscar-winning film “Platoon” before carving out a journeyman career with steady TV work and straight-to-video productions. He died Friday evening of a suspected heart attack at 48.

Quinn collapsed on the street where he lived in Malibu while walking home from a nearby store with one of his sons, said Lt. James Royal of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s Malibu/Lost Hills station. He was pronounced dead at Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center. Quinn’s agent, Arlene Thornton, said in a statement that the cause had not been determined but that he was believed to have suffered a heart attack.

One of a reported 13 children of Anthony Quinn, the Academy Award-winning actor remembered for his title role in “Zorba the Greek,” Francesco Daniele Quinn was born in Rome in 1963. His mother, Iolanda Addolori, was an Italian wardrobe assistant who met his father on the set of the film “Barabbas” and later married him. The couple had two more children.

Francesco Quinn’s ancestry — Anthony was of Mexican-Irish descent — allowed him to portray a range of characters.ADVERTISEMENT

After playing the drug-dealing soldier Rhah in “Platoon,” Oliver Stone’s 1986 Vietnam War drama that won the Academy Award for best picture, Quinn appeared in more than a dozen films. In “The Tonto Woman,” a Western based on an Elmore Leonard story that became a 2008 Academy Award nominee for best live-action short, he played a Mexican gunslinger.

On television, he had recurring roles in prime time series, including “JAG,” “24″ and “The Shield,” and from 1999 to 2001, he played writer Tomas del Cerro on the soap opera “The Young and the Restless.” He also played the young Santiago in a TV movie version of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” that starred his father as the title character.

Quinn’s survivors include his wife, Valentina Castellani-Quinn, and three children. He was previously married to Julie McCann.

His father died at 86 in 2001.

Lena Olin was born in 1955 in Stockholm, Sweden. She has been leading lady to some of the movie icons of the past twenty years including Daniel Day-Lewis in the “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” in 1988, “Havana” with Robert Redford and Johnny Depp in “The Ninth Gate”. She is married to the film director Lasse Halstorm.

TCM overview:

A powerful and beautiful Swedish actress in the tradition of Greta Garbo, Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullmann, Lena Olin first came to prominence in Sweden as a “Bergman actress,” working in plays and films directed by the great Ingmar Bergman. The child of actors-her father, Stig Olin, appeared in Bergman films during the 1940s and 50s-she gravitated to the profession in an attempt to overcome her crippling shyness, and though she failed her first audition for the Royal Dramatic Theater school, Bergman saw enough to cast her in a small role in his “Face to Face” (1976). She went on to appear in “The Adventures of Picasso” (1978) and acted for Bergman in “Fanny and Alexander” (1982). In “After the Rehearsal” (1984), she played Anna, a character written expressly for her. Her role as an actress who infuriates her director by getting pregnant while working on one of August Strindberg’s plays prefigured actual events when her own pregnancy would complicate a Bergman production of Strindberg’s “A Dream Play”.

Olin’s performance as Cordelia in a Bergman-directed “King Lear” at Stockholm’s Royal Dramatic Theater in 1985 brought her to the attention of Bertil Ohlsson, executive producer of Philip Kaufman’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” (1988), adapted from Milan Kundera’s best-selling novel of love and eroticism set against the 1968 Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. Her turn in that film as Sabina, the bowler hat-wearing artist-mistress of Daniel Day-Lewis, was the first of a series of smart, sexy roles showcasing her unique bearing and dancer’s grace, helping to establish her international reputation as a “thinking man’s beauty.” Whereas the kinky Sabina’s sexual proclivities served as a counterpoint to political oppression, the suicidal Masha in Paul Mazursky’s “Enemies, a Love Story” (1989) used sex to escape the pain and humiliation of her Holocaust past. Comfortable with her body, Olin appeared in both films without her clothes, and “Enemies” contained sex scenes as graphic as an R rating permitted, prompting the actress to remark that “nudity is just another costume.”

Oscar-nominated for her supporting turn as Masha, Olin continued her penchant for films with a background of political upheaval, acting opposite Robert Redford in the Sydney Pollack-directed “Havana” (1990), a disappointing “Casablanca”-like tale of Cuba in the late 50s, perhaps unjustly maligned as a complete bomb. After making her New York theater debut with a moving turn as the tormented titular character in a 1991 Swedish-language production of “Miss Julie”, directed by Bergman, she returned to the screen opposite Richard Gere in the dubious “Mr. Jones” (1993), a dull doctor-patient love story with little foundation in reality. She fared far better as the standout of that year’s “Romeo Is Bleeding”, playing her most outrageous role to date, a psychopathic, Russian assassin (with thighs of steel) who even cuts off her arm to evade capture. She also sandwiched two European flicks, the moribund “The Night & the Moment” (1994) and the slick Swedish actioner “Hamilton” (1998), around Sidney Lumet’s “Night Falls on Manhattan” (1997), in which she romanced Andy Garcia.

An instinctual actress who won’t look at rushes for fear she might inhibit herself and start to think, Olin completely disdains the perks of stardom, and her indifference to celebrity makes her cautious around the press. Few of her peers, however, can play the complicated, ambiguous characters which are her staple, figures existing on several emotional levels at once, often on the edge of madness. In Teresa Connelly’s “Polish Wedding” (1998) she relished her role as a strong-willed mother of five who, although her family means everything to her, still tries to capture the excitement of her youth through illicit love. Olin had a small role as psychiatrist to Casanova Frankenstein (Geoffrey Rush) in the superhero send-up “Mystery Men” (1999) and then performed her determined hellcat routine with gusto as a leader of a satanic cult for Roman Polanski’s “The Ninth Gate”, its US release moved back three months to March 2000 to give a little more separation between it and another supernatural picture also starring Johnny Depp, Tim Burton’s “Sleepy Hollow”.

The actress finally achieved the long-held dream of working with her director husband Lasse Hallstrom on “Chocolat” (2000), a delicious morality play with a subtle message about tolerance. Cast as Josephine, a kleptomaniac and abused wife who is shunned by the townspeople, Olin was terrific in the part, particularly in the character’s transformation from mousy doormat to chocolate maker under the watchful eye of the mysterious Vianne (Juliette Binoche). Having done some of her best work in years, she followed up as the maternal vampire Maharet in “Queen of the Damned” (2001), based on Anne Rice’s novel. Olin resurfaced on American television in 2002 in the form of the “Alias” (2002- ) recurring character Irina Derevko/Laura Bristow, the mysterious double agent mother of lead character Syndney Bristow (Jennifer Garner). Despite an impressive performance, an impasse in contract negotiations ultimately led her to ultimately leave the series.

She also was featured in a high profile role as Harrison Ford’s love interest in writer-director Ron Shelton’s action comedy “Hollywood Homicide” (2003). Meanwhile, the actress starred as Maria, the mother in an American family that moves into an old house in the remote countryside of Spain, in director Jaume Balaguero’s second stab at the horror genre, “Darkness” (2004). Though filmed in 2001, it was released in the United States in December 2004 to poor reviews and mediocre box office. Olin’s next effort “Casanova” (2005), director Lasse Hallstrom’s fictionalized account of the legendary lothario (Heath Ledger) falling in love at last, was easily one of the most ill-conceived and disappointing films of the year, despite lavish production values and game performances by Olin–as the debt-ridden noblewoman who enters her daughter (Sienna Miller) into a marriage of convenience–and the rest of the all-star cast.

The above TCM overview can also be accessed online here.

Jane Mallory Birkin was born on 14 December 1946, in Marylebone, London. Her mother, Judy Campbell, was an English actress, best known for her work on stage. Her father, David Birkin, was a Royal Navy lieutenant-commander and World War II spy. Her brother is the screenwriter and director Andrew Birkin. She was educated at Upper Chine School, Isle of Wight.”Je t’aime” made UK chart history in that on 4 October 1969 and the following week on 11 October, the song was at two different chart positions even though it is the same song, the same artists, and the same recorded version

TCM overview:Landed several lightweight movie roles in the 1960s, when her looks seemed to symbolize the swinging spirit of the times (she played one of the nude models in Antonioni’s 1966 “Blow-Up”) and subsequently resurfaced as a respected talent in France. Birkin was the subject of a documentary by Agnes Varda, “Jane B. par Agnes V.” (1988) and gave an affecting performance opposite Dirk Bogarde in Bertrand Tavernier’s “Daddy Nostalgia” (1990). Her younger daughter Charlotte Gainsbourg, by composer-director Serge Gainsbourg, is also an actress and her brother is writer-director Andrew Birkin (“Burning Secret” 1988). The ultra-expensive luxury item the Birkin bag was created by Hermès head Jean-Louis Dumas in 1984, inspired by a meeting with the actress and singer in which she complained about never finding a leather purse she really liked.

Jane Birkin died in Paris in 2023 aged 76.

The Times obituary in 2023:

Shortly after Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg had recorded the infamously erotic Je t’aime . . . moi non plus, the couple went to dinner at the Hôtel des Beaux Arts in Paris.

“There was a record player, and without saying a word, Serge put the song on,” Birkin recalled. “All of a sudden all the couples around us stopped talking, their knives and forks held in mid-air.”

As their fellow diners sat transfixed by the record’s sexually explicit lyrics interspersed with Birkin’s orgasmic gasps and moans, Gainsbourg turned to his lover. “I think we’ve got a hit record,” he said.

Birkin with Serge Gainsbourg and their daughter Charlotte in 1971

Indeed, the duo not only had a hit but a song that would become an avatar for the Swinging Sixties and its sexual permissiveness — a “symbol of freedom”, as Birkin called it.

Prudes and moral guardians everywhere were outraged. The Vatican denounced the record and the BBC banned it, as did countless other radio stations around the world.

The critic Sylvie Simmons described the song as “the musical equivalent of a Vaseline-smeared Emmanuelle movie”, and the aural sex that oozed from the grooves was too libidinous even for the traditional Gallic laissez-faire: the record was declared too risqué to be played on French radio before an 11pm watershed. In Italy the head of Gainsbourg and Birkin’s record label was jailed for offending public morality.

The bans only served to enhance the record’s success and Gainsbourg called Pope Paul VI “our greatest PR man”. Je t’aime . . . moi non plus hit No 1 in the UK charts in the autumn of 1969, the first banned record to do so. It remained in the charts for 31 weeks and was said to have contributed to a dramatic spike in the birth rate.

Birkin in Cannes in 2021 for the release of a film, Jane Par Charlotte, about her by her daughter Charlotte

A prurient media speculated that it was a genuine live sex session recorded in the boudoir rather than faked in the studio, although Gainsbourg denied it. “Thank goodness it wasn’t, otherwise I hope it would have been a long-playing record,” he said. Birkin giggled alongside him as he said it.

Birkin had arrived in Paris in 1968 as a 21-year-old aspiring actress with an androgynous figure and an innocent baby-doll look that had earned her a role in Antonioni’s “swinging London” movie Blow-Up. She also had a one-year-old daughter from a brief marriage to the film composer John Barry, who as soon as she had fallen pregnant left her for an even younger model and moved to Los Angeles.