 and divorced John Barry, the Oscar-winning film composer, given birth to her first child (Kate Barry) and stripped off in Blow-Up, Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 classic. Today, she tells me that 'my decision to go to France – not Spain or Italy – was driven by my father's huge admiration for the French Resistance members he'd known during the war. I knew he had won the Distinguished Service Cross. But, because he was bound by the Official Secrets Act, I didn't have a complete idea of what they had all done together until later on… of why he admired the Bretons without limits.' This month, the full story of David Birkin's war work is revealed in Tim Spicer's A Dangerous Enterprise. The book gives a gripping account of the 15th Motor Gun Boat Flotilla, th){kind=link}
David Birkin was an unlikely naval hero – but he didn’t let that stop him, as his famous daughter reveals in this archive interview
This interview from 2021 has been republished following the death of Jane Birkin at the age of 76
Every day this summer, Jane Birkin has taken a walk along the “treacherous” Brittany coast around which her father sailed by night during the Second World War. As a navigator in a clandestine naval unit, Lt-Cdr David Birkin’s job, she tells me, was “taking British spies across the Channel to France and bringing home stranded airmen and escaped POWs”.
She knows precisely how dangerous that must have been, because she’s been out in a small boat to sail in his wake many times and admits: “Every summer, I’ve got myself caught out. These waters have such terrible currents, you know. Awful. When I walk through the wind on grey days like today, I think of these men, sitting waiting in their boats in the cold and the dark, not able to light a cigarette in case the Germans saw the glow.”
Dividing her time between Paris and a small village in Brittany, the 74-year-old singer, actress and fashion icon has lived in France since 1969. That was the year in which Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg, her lover at the time, caused a scandal by releasing the suggestive song Je t’aime… moi non plus. By that point, she had already married (aged 18) and divorced John Barry, the Oscar-winning film composer, given birth to her first child (Kate Barry) and stripped off in Blow-Up, Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 classic.