Gabrielle Crawford, who released a photographic book dedicated to Jane Birkin, returned to The Orient-The Day on the toxic relationship that the London singer allegedly had with her ex-husband John Barry, father of her eldest daughter Kate Barry, in the mid-1960s.
Jane Birkin was only 17 when she met John Barry in the mid-1960s during auditions for the musical Passion Flower Hotel. The composer, famous for arranging the original soundtracks of James Bondhad 13 more. A union that the Londoner’s parents had not really approved of. “[M]my father let me get married. But for him, it was a catastrophe: firstly, I was doing theater like my mother, and secondly, I got married and left home at 17!” she said in the show Tea or Coffee in April 2017. From their story, which ended in divorce in 1968, was born Kate Barry, a talented photographer who died in 2013.
‘Nothing positive’ to say about Jane Birkin’s ex-husband, says her closest friend
In his photographic work It’s Jane, Birkin Jane (ed. Actes Sud), Gabrielle Crawford retraced 60 years of friendship through memories nourished by testimonies from loved ones. The opportunity for the confidante of the most French of British singers to look back on her story with the first man of her life, John Barry, in unflattering terms. “Nothing positive can be said about this individual. He destroyed her, made her doubt, broke all her self-confidence. Fortunately she got to know Serge quickly after this chaotic episode,” she said in the columns of The Orient-The Daypublished this Monday January 13, 2025.
Serge Gainsbourg “madly loved” Jane Birkin
In his book Munkey Diaries (ed. Fayard), Jane Birkin described her ex-husband John Barry as a man “absent, contemptuous, unfaithful”. The rest of the story went down in posterity: shortly after her divorce from the English pianist, the interpreter ofEx-fan des sixties met Serge Gainsbourg, with whom she lived a passionate story, which gave rise to the birth of her second daughter, Charlotte Gainsbourg. “He immediately loved her madly. He loved her so much that he made her forget everything that anyone had ever accused him of before,” further affirmed to The Orient-The Day his great friend Gabrielle Crawford, who was still at his bedside the day before his death, in the heart of summer 2023.
