For its 20th issue, Harper’s Bazaar dedicates its cover to Charlotte Gainsbourg, born famous and whose film debut takes us back 40 years. Since its revelation in The Effronteein 1985, the 53-year-old actress played in around sixty films – notably with her companion the director Yvan Attal – and added her voice to a handful of albums. In an interview with our colleagues, the actress and singer looked back on this long career, the legacy of her famous parents Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin, but also on the gigantic void left by her sister Kate Berry after suddenly losing her life in 2013, falling from the window of his Parisian apartment, at the age of 46. “When Kate died, I had things to express. It was such an explosion. It had to come out and I didn't care to take the risk that it would be mediocre. And in the end, I'm proud of the disk”, she explained, about her album Restreleased in 2017.
Charlotte Gainsbourg had “just need to run away”
The sudden disappearance of Kate, a renowned photographer, deeply affected her mother Jane Birkin and her sister Charlotte Gainsbourg, seven years her junior. “My mother, as one can imagine, passed away. We went to see her but she no longer saw us, we had become invisible. It was too much, I had to leave, I didn't know how to do it. otherwise”explained the interpreter ofElastic has Harper’s Bazaarevoking his exile in the United States ten years ago. Leaving Paris had become a necessity. “I loved my years in New York, I felt open to the world, to others, I chatted with taxi drivers, I took my children to school in the morning in my pajamas, I didn't care. But I could have just gone somewhere else, I just needed to escape.”she again declared to our colleagues.
This guilt that ate away at Charlotte Gainsbourg
For Charlotte Gainsbourg, who grew up in Paris, staying in France had become too painful after the death of Kate Barry. To this day, it is unknown whether his fall was intentional or accidental. “The death of my sister was such a cataclysm. It was unbearable for me to imagine living where she had come, at home, in my daily life or rue de Verneuil. I could no longer function”remembered the actress, mother of three children and in a relationship for more than 20 years with filmmaker Yvan Attal. This decision was not easy, in a difficult context of mourning. “At the time, I was living in New York with great guilt within me for having left there when we had just lost my sister, and therefore her daughter, as if I had abandoned my mother to save myself “, she had already confided to Marie Clairein 2023.
