Jane Birkin got invited to test for a role in Slogan . That was the good news. The bad news was she had taken an instant dislike to the film’s star. Serge Gainsbourg was a multi-threat musician, songwriter, producer, director, and actor who embodied a certain French national spirit and whose collaborations with other artists were the stuff of legend. “He’s meant to be my lover, but he’s so arrogant and snobbish — he absolutely despises me,” Birkin said on the telephone to her brother, Andrew. His own memory was, “She described him as this ghastly man who was arrogant and made her feel like a worm.”

Slogan was about a French director of commercials for consumer goods named Serge Fabergé (Gainsbourg, for whom the role was written) who meets a British woman, Evelyne (Birkin, who plays

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