Replacing Camille Cottin in the highly anticipated series Etoile on Prime Video, Charlotte Gainsbourg dives into the world of ballet companies in Paris and New York. A city that she knows very well, having actually settled there. Yvan Attal’s partner and mother of their three children Ben (born in 1997), Alice (2002) and Jo (2011), had made the radical choice to settle down on the other side of the Atlantic a long time ago. a few years, but not for professional reasons. In the pages of the magazine Harper’s Bazaar for which she made the magnificent cover, the daughter of Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg – to whom she dedicated, not without difficulty, an exceptional place of memory – looks back on this decision, which hides immense pain.
After the sudden death of her older sister Kate Barry in December 2013, Charlotte Gainsbourg took off. She chose the Big Apple and looks back on this adventure to Harper’s Bazaar : “I loved my years in New York I felt differentopen to the world, to others. I chatted with taxi drivers, I walked my children to school in the morning in my pajamas, I didn’t care. But I could have just as easily gone elsewhere. I just needed to run awayr.”
Leaving a city where she experienced the tragedy of losing her sister, who died at the age of 46 after falling from her window in Paris. Daughter of the composer John Barry and Jane Birkin, she was the mother of a son, Roman de Kermadec. In the magazine, Charlotte Gainsbourg speaks with emotion about this painful period and the repercussions on her famous mother: “My sister’s death was such a cataclysm. It was unbearable for me to live where she had come, at home, in my daily life or rue de Verneuil. I couldn’t function anymore. My mother, as one can imagine, passed away. We were going to see her but she no longer saw us, we had become invisible. It was too much. I had to leave, I couldn’t do otherwise.”
-Charlotte Gainsbourg in New York, her guilt towards her mother Jane Birkin
A difficult decision to live in New York and Charlotte Gainsbourg had not hidden her feeling of guilt towards her mother. “I lived 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 explained in the pages of Marie-Claire. It is in this context that she decided to make the documentary, nominated for the César, Jane by Charlotte, which allowed him to spend precious time with her: “I had to give myself the right not to look down, to scrutinize her, to deepen my gaze. I didn’t learn anything about her, that wasn’t the goal, but I learned to put our relationship into words.“A sublime memory of her mother, who died on July 16, 2023, with whom she returned to live in 2020, worried about her loved ones at the time of the pandemic.
