Afterwards they'd hit the town in a big way looking for crowds to create un spectacle

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Afterwards, they'd hit the town in a big way, looking for crowds, "to create un spectacle... a bit of a figuration", with Serge distributing high-denomination notes to strangers, saying "oh, they're prostitutes, just like me" They never took drugs, just drank enormous amounts of wine. Once, when she tried to drive - "more than a little drunk" - the short distance from some night spot near the Eiffel Tower to her home of the time, Birkin crashed into a lamp post, with the result that the car could only turn right, "which was fine," she says, "because all the turns I needed to make were right".She has an interesting way of glossing over what must have been quite a frightening time. Gainsbourg was drinking himself to death, yet she recalls him with pure jollity. I ask about Gainsbourg's relationship with her late father, a patrician-class war hero turned painter, and she affectionately recalls that, both being bad sleepers, they'd take their mandraxes together, "and both fall over like lovely old owls".She left Gainsbourg in 1981, and moved in with the French film director, Jacques Doillon, but she remained close to Gainsbourg, and when he died in 1991, within weeks of her adored father, the relationship with Doillon swiftly broke up. She doesn't talk about this dark time.Her career, if not her emotional life, prospered after she left Gainsbourg.

In the Seventies she had acted in a series of comedies for the French market. I ask whether they were in English or French and she says, "It didn't really seem to matter". The most successful was called Mustard Gets Up My Nose, which she airily describes as "a-French-star-has-a-relationship-with-Henry-Kissinger type film" and "quite Benny Hill" French humour.. it's a strange, problematic sort of area. But she won't criticise these movies; she's famously loyal to her directors.She went on to feature in a series of unequivocally good French films, such as Jacques Rivette's La Belle Noiseuse, and Bertrand Tavernier's Daddy Nostalgie.

She also wrote her first play, Ah Pardon, Tu Dormais, a bittersweet comedy about a collapsing marriage, which was a big success in Paris, and is currently touring in provincial France. In The Last September, she turns in a very watchable comic performance, providing the light note in a movie otherwise steeped in Go-Between-ish melancholy.She's always been self-deprecating about her talents, and this modesty is more justified in the case of her singing than her acting. She sounds at best like Mary Hopkins, or some well-bred folkie, but her voice is pretty wispy. She continues to record, but only the wistful, wordy songs of Gainsbourg, whose work she is determined to proselytise. She earnestly asks me whether the English might take to his songs done with African-style accompaniment.