Jane Birkin’s presbytery in Normandy: “It was a stroke of madness”

The interview reveals some details of her daily life in Normandy, the fact that she sleeps there every night with her earplugs because she doesn’t like silence, for example. Jane Birkin bought the former presbytery of Cresseveuille in the 1970s with Serge Gainsbourg. She confided on the airwaves of France Inter : “It overlooks the cemetery and the highway, it was a priest’s house. I was lucky, I bought it for very little and because I suddenly had money, with the film The Mustard is Going Up to My Nose, I blew all my money in there. It was crazy because I loved that house, it was wonderful. » Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg sold the property in the 1990s, after the first steps of Charlotte Gainsbourg and Kate Barry in the garden. In 2018, Charlotte Gainsbourg recalled these childhood memories in Ouest-France, when she was invited to the Beauregard festival near Caen: “Kate and I have watched Donkey Skin thousands of times. My first love, Didier, was there too. He was my sister’s age, I was crazy about him at 7 years old. But it was Gabrielle’s daughter, my mother’s best friend, who ended up kissing her. It was a modest house” before continuing: “we spent unforgettable moments there between 1975 and 1991, the year of his disappearance. »

A Parisian day with Jane Birkin

In February 1999, the show A day with Jane Birkin journalists Franck Peltier and Claude Barnier look back on their Parisian daily life, a day which “starts a little late in the morning”…Described as “an Alice in Wonderland who is always running”Jane Birkin explains on camera that she gets up around 11 a.m. before running incessantly, all day, until 4 a.m. She walks around Saint-Germain-des-Prés and rue de Buci, buying croissants which she stuffs into her legendary Hermès Birkin bag — full to bursting, faithful to its legendary use. At her ophthalmologist, Jane Birkin laughs: “I’m blind!” » The report was archived by the INA.