Charlotte Gainsbourg's Real Name: Charlotte Gainsbourg

Quick answer: Charlotte Gainsbourg uses her own name, taken from her father, the French songwriter Serge Gainsbourg. AllMusic says she was born on July 21, 1971, in London, England, and lists her full name as Charlotte Lucy Gainsbourg. The middle name Lucy appears in only one qualifying source. A Library of Congress record agrees on London and July 21, though a second note in that record gives July 22.

Real name and early life

AllMusic says she is the daughter of British actress Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg. She began singing professionally around the same time she started acting. As a teenager she recorded with her father: a 1984 duet that reached number two in France and was certified gold, and the 1986 album Charlotte for Ever, tied to a film he directed in which they both starred.

For Charlotte, Gainsbourg is simply the surname she was born with, not a professional alias. AllMusic describes her as carrying on her father's "provocative legacy."

Career highlights

AllMusic says she returned to music in the 2000s, first with the spoken introduction to Madonna's "What It Feels Like for a Girl" (2001). Her album 5:55 (2006) was written with Air's Jean-Benoît Dunckel and Nicolas Godin, with lyrics by Jarvis Cocker and Neil Hannon and production by Nigel Godrich. It topped the French chart and went platinum there. IRM (2009), produced by Beck, was a Top Five hit in France. Rest (2017), largely in French, won her Female Artist of the Year at the 2018 Victoires de la Musique.

On screen, she won the Best Actress prize at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival for Lars von Trier's Antichrist. In her acceptance speech, quoted by the festival, she called the role "the most intense, painful, and thrilling experience" of her career. Her mother, she said, had been her confidante on the set. AllMusic notes her work in Michel Gondry's The Science of Sleep and Todd Haynes's I'm Not There. She also starred in von Trier's Nymphomaniac (2013), which brought European Film Award and Bodil nominations.

AllMusic lists later films including Promise at Dawn, which earned a César nomination, Lux Æterna (2019), and Jane by Charlotte (2021), a film about her mother that Gainsbourg directed.

Name notes for searchers

Her name is often searched alongside her parents' names, Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg. Searches for Charlotte Lucy Gainsbourg refer to the same artist. She was born in London but works mainly in France; AllMusic says Rest was written in her "native French," while earlier albums such as 5:55 used English-language lyricists. She also sang backing vocals on Badly Drawn Boy's 2002 album Have You Fed the Fish?