Do we like them?

Do we like Jane Birkin?

Our score: 9 out of 10. Decades of campaigning for human rights and animals, no harmful words or company found, and the only wobble is the bag she was tied to.

Nothing new on her lately. Jane Birkin died in Paris on 16 July 2023, aged 76, and the coverage since is mostly tributes. French President Emmanuel Macron called her a “complete artist” when the news broke.

She was London-born, the daughter of an actor and a naval officer, and became a star of the 1960s with Blow-Up before moving to France. Her Slogan co-star turned partner Serge Gainsbourg gave her the banned duet “Je T'aime … Moi Non Plus”, which still managed to hit number one in the UK. She went on to work with Godard, Rivette and Varda and directed her own film, Boxes, in 2006.

The harm check is a clean sheet, and then some. Her activism covered Amnesty International, Myanmar's pro-democracy movement and the fight against AIDS, and in 2008 she joined monks on a march in Cannes over cyclone aid for Myanmar. Tributes also noted her stance on women's and LGBT rights. We found no harmful statements, and no dodgy company, in anything we read.

Her own words explain the pattern. In a 2012 interview she said it was simpler to act than sit with her guilt over suffering on TV, and she backed refugees, the fight against the death penalty and abortion rights. In 2001 she urged people to back an Amnesty campaign against torture, saying “You can always do something”.

The one wrinkle is the Hermès bag with her name on it. In 2015, after a PETA video from a Texas farm that supplies the brand, she asked Hermès to take her name off the crocodile version. Hermès said it was shocked by the images and was investigating. It's a bit awkward, but she was the one raising the alarm.