Born on 21 July: Charlotte Gainsbourg, an immense talent who finally found her own voice

Between Jane Birkin and her sultry father Serge, Charlotte finally found her way.

Daughter of Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin, she was born in London in 1971. She celebrates her 53rd birthday today.

She has always been her father's favourite. In 1984, when she was just 13, he wrote the troubled and downright perverse ‘Lemon Incest’ (on the album ‘Love On The Beat’) for her, giving her her first public performance as a singer. Fortunately, she has made a lot of progress since then. In 2017, at the age of 46, Charlotte Gainsbourg finally lifted the veil on her difficult period in her life as an adolescence: "My father made me go too far," she says with restraint. "He made me do things that bothered me. It was difficult. He couldn't understand why I didn't like it."

For her part, her mother Jane invited her to try out her acting talents as a teenager. As a precocious child, she got her first role in ‘Parole et musique’ by Elie Chouraqui. A few years later, her first major role in Claude Miller's ‘L'effrontée’ won her the César for Best New Actress. She went on to play a series of memorable roles in ‘La petite voleuse’ (again with Claude Miller, based on a screenplay by François Truffaut), followed by ‘Merci La vie’ by Bertrand Blier, “Amoureuse” by Jacques Doillon and ‘La bûche’ by Danièle Thompson.

As for her musical career, under the influence of her father, the album ‘Charlotte Forever’ in 1986, still provocative and sulphurous, is proving difficult if not impossible to listen to today, for both the artist and the average listener. It took Charlotte eight years to lick her wounds and agree to sing again for the Enfoirés tour in aid of the Restos du Coeur charity. Gradually, she tried out new experiences (notably with Madonna) before releasing her second album ‘5:55’ in 2006 with a plethora of patrons far more benevolent than her father. Jarvis Cocker (Blur), Neil Hannon (The Divine Comedy) and Air all rushed to give her their backing. And because Charlotte Gainsbourg never does things by halves, she threw herself wholeheartedly into the adventure with an even better third effort, ‘IRM’, in 2009, followed by a live album packed with seven previously unreleased tracks, culminating in ‘Rest’ in 2017, a little masterpiece of atmospheric electro-pop. Since 2021, rumour has it that she's been working on new tracks, but there's nothing on the horizon. With the exception of the single ‘Waking Up’ with Django Django in February 2021...

(MH with Stéphane Soupart - Photo : © Etienne Tordoir)

Photo: Charlotte Gainsbourg at the Lokerse Feesten in Lokeren (Belgium) on 6 August 2019