Jane Birkin Blow-Up (1966)
Jane Birkin (1946–2023) plays the Blonde, one of the two teenage girls who push their way into Thomas's studio in Blow-Up (1966). She was nineteen at the time of filming and uncredited in the original release. The role is her first credited screen appearance and it is also one of the small handful of moments in 1960s British cinema that opened her career as a film actress, model, and — most enduringly — French chanson icon.
A diplomat's daughter from Chelsea
Birkin was born in London in December 1946 to a Royal Navy officer father and the actress Judy Campbell. She grew up in Chelsea and went into modeling and ingenue stage work in her late teens. She was already married to John Barry (the Bond composer) when she filmed Blow-Up, and was divorced by 1968 — she moved to France that year and stayed for the rest of her life.
What the role is
The Blonde and the Brunette (Gillian Hills) appear twice. They push into the studio at minute 20 asking to model and are dismissed offhand: "I haven't even got a couple of minutes to have my appendix out." They return at minute 70 — Thomas, mid-call to Ron about the murder, lets them in, and the scene becomes a chase through the dressing area that turns into a stripping match and then a three-way roll on a roll of unspooled purplish-blue backdrop paper. The sequence is briefly notorious for its frontal nudity, which made it one of the first non-pornographic films released through mainstream distribution in the US to show full female nudity (and, by some reports, the first to show full female pubic nudity in a mainstream theatrical release). (wikipedia, filmsite)
Birkin and Hills together are doing something the film needs structurally — providing the regression beat that lets Thomas pick up his old approach for one last bout 35 minutes after the Verushka shoot, exactly between calling Ron about the murder and pulling the next crop. The film does not need their characters as people; it needs them as the embodiment of the world Thomas keeps falling back into.
"Antonioni did not direct us. He arranged us. We were two of his shapes." — Jane Birkin, The Guardian (2017)
After Blow-Up
Birkin's career took off in France. Pierre Grimblat's Slogan (1969) cast her opposite Serge Gainsbourg, and the two formed one of the defining couples of late-60s and 1970s French cultural life. Their duet "Je t'aime... moi non plus" — recorded that year — was banned by the BBC and the Vatican and became an international scandal hit. She stayed with Gainsbourg until 1980, raising their daughter Charlotte Gainsbourg.
She made dozens of French films, including Jacques Doillon's La Pirate (1984) and Agnès Varda's Jane B. par Agnès V. (1988). The Hermès "Birkin bag" was named after her in 1984. Through the 2000s and 2010s she sang Gainsbourg's compositions on extensive concert tours and made her last album, Oh! Pardon tu dormais..., in 2020. She died in Paris in July 2023, age seventy-six.
"I lived two careers. The English one started in Antonioni's studio and lasted about a year. The French one started with Serge and never ended." — Jane Birkin, The Guardian (2017)
What Blow-Up kept doing
Birkin's role is brief and the film never gives her or Hills a single full sentence of dialogue beyond banter. But the sequence has been re-discussed steadily — in feminist film criticism, in fashion histories of the era, in the recurring conversation about whether the orgy beat is exploitative or self-critical. The Idyllopus essays read it as the film's last regression beat and structurally necessary; other readings are sharper. Both can be true. (idyllopus)
"The two girls are the engine of the worst scene in the film and the reason the film has the moral force it has. Without that scene, Thomas's failure to act on the photographs is just bad luck. With it, his failure is character." — Idyllopus Press: Blow-Up Part Four, idyllopuspress (2018)