Jane Birkin

Jane Birkin's way into cinema was Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up, and three years later she played the eighteen-year-old daughter in Deray's The Swimming Pool. The most unusual work of her career is the double portrait she made with Agnes Varda in the year she turned forty: Jane B. by Agnes V. is at once a film in which the director looks at the actor and a portrait of the director herself, and the Criterion assessment says the word feminism never comes up in it while the work is all the same an exemplary feminist one. That same year she carried the relation between a woman just turned forty and a boy lost in video games in Varda's Kung-Fu Master!. In Jacques Rivette's four-hour La Belle Noiseuse she is the painter's wife and former model, and in Bertrand Tavernier's Daddy Nostalgia the screenwriter who connects for the first time with her dying father.