As he wrote in one of the songs, `One day you’ll know that I gave you the best of me.’ And he did.” Cellos next time, she thinks, and “wonderful, ferocious” drummers from Tobago and Japan.Other people have asked her to apply her wispy, untrained voice to their songs. It doesn’t really matter whether other things come out of it or not. Having talked to Annie for about three seconds, I knew I wanted to work with her. I would have displeased myself enormously if I hadn’t taken up the courage that she showed when I said to her, `I’ll be a risk,’ and she said, `I like taking risks.’ “After Euripides, there may be a last rendezvous with Gainsbourg – who, she feels, gave her his most interesting songs – “songs that he didn’t want to sing, perhaps out of pudeur, because he liked to sing provocative songs with American musicians, so he gave me sad songs to sing with English musicians.

But was this in fact the exact moment when you could come back? No one’s relying on you any more to take them to school, or not to die, or not to be too far from your father .. And I could be with my mother again. An agent announced himself, and then sent her off to a reading with Annie Castledine “There was no plan. Charlotte is 23, with a burgeoning movie career of her own, including a role in the 1992 adaptation of Ian McEwan’s The Cement Garden, directed by Jane’s brother, Andrew Birkin. The recreation of that heavenly childhood on a Berkshire farm is a big thing with the grown-up Birkins: there were 22 people for Christmas at the house in Brittany, including Andrew and the younger sister, Linda, each with their three sons, under Judy Campbell’s eye.”I DIDN’T for a second expect to do anything more in England,” she said. “I think it’s just luck, the way people come and fish you out when you’re rather wondering what to do.”She came to London last autumn , for a charity recital of Gainsbourg’s songs at the Savoy. Of her other daughters, Kate, now 27, has a small son and runs a drug rehabilitation centre, which she set up just outside Paris four years ago, putting her work as a fashion designer on hold. This involved her in writing assessments of 30,000 entries from all over France: “As you knew it was all going back to these children, you couldn’t just do it briefly.

By the end, for the last three nights, I was going off to the theatre in my pyjamas because there was no longer enough day in which to read these things …” Now she will be heard on two songs on a forthcoming Aids CD, one a duet with Suede’s Brett Anderson (“Most gifted,” she remarked, “and extremely modest”).She is no longer with Doillon, but still lives with Lou in a house near the Eiffel tower. Now she took on Marivaux’s La fausse suivante, followed by a translation of Israel Horowitz’s Park Your Car in Harvard Yard and, for more than a year, L’Aide mmoire, a two-hander with Pierre Arditti.She has made one of 30 three-minute movies for the 30th anniversary of Amnesty Inter-national, shown on French TV, and she was head of the jury selecting 10 children to make short films on Aids-related subjects, screened before the TV news in the month leading up to International Aids Day. So suddenly things changed.”Eventually she wrote and directed her own movie, a black comedy called Pardon, tu dormais!. And she went back to the stage, two decades after her very limited West End experience as a 17-year-old ingnue (in Graham Greene’s Carving the Statue, with Ralph Richardson, and a musical called Passion Flower Hotel). I thought there was just the Gritti Palace, where you took the suite with Serge and drank some rather delicious champagne with peach juice in it.

She began to attend film festivals, sometimes as a nominee: “I suddenly found myself in Venice, having previously managed to ignore the fact that there was a film festival there. “Jacques made me button my shirt up to the collar, not letting the slightest bit show, and said, `That way they’ll look into your mind, into your head.’ He scraped my hair back, wouldn’t let me wear make-up. The critics said, `We didn’t know she could do anything like that.’ “Warm reviews prefaced work of increasing depth with such directors as Bertrand Tavernier (Daddy Nostalgie, with Dirk Bogarde), Jacques Rivette (La belle noiseuse, with Emmanuelle Bart and Piccoli again), Agns Varda (Jane B par Agns V) and Marion Hnsel (Dust, with Trevor Howard). The contrast with Gainsbourg, who had photographed her naked and chained to a wall for Lui magazine, was not hard to spot. He also directed her in La Fille prodigue, with Michel Piccoli. He used to ring me up and say, `You’ve got the cover!’ I’d say, `I know, it’s a terrible magazine, I’m suing them.’ He’d say, `No, no, no, Janette, you mustn’t, you mustn’t.

Then you won’t be in the press…’ Quite a different way of looking at it.” Between them, she said, she and Gainsbourg read two books in their 13 years together (Madame Bovary and Benjamin Constant’s Adolph, since you ask).Doillon gave her a third daughter – Lou, now aged 12 – to go with Kate, from her first marriage, to the composer John Barry, and Charlotte, her child by Gainsbourg. I was living with somebody who was terribly shy and found the whole thing terribly embarrassing Whereas Serge loved it. If he wasn’t on the cover of a magazine, he’d go into a deep depression He bought every magazine, just in case he was in it. Where Gainsbourg had told that if she was depressed she should go into a home, Doillon taught her how to put her private emotions into her work.”I went behind a wall,” she said last week, “and I’ve lived behind it for the last 13 years, really.