Charlotte Gainsbourg

While Charlotte Gainsbourg is better known as an accomplished actress than as a musician, her singing career has also been significant. Around the same time she began acting, Gainsbourg also started singing professionally. At 13, she recorded her debut, Charlotte for Ever, an album of songs written by her father, singer/songwriter/provocateur Serge Gainsbourg, that was inspired by the film he directed and in which they both starred. The infamous father-daughter duet "Lemon Incest" mirrored the sexually precocious tone of her early films, which included 1986's L'Effrontee (which won her a Cesar for Most Promising Young Actress), 1988's La Petite Voleuse, and 1991's Merci la Vie. During the '90s she concentrated on acting, appearing in movies as eclectic as Franco Zeffirelli's 1996 adaptation of Jane Eyre to 1999's La Buche, for which she won a Cesar for Best Supporting Actress, but in the 2000s Gainsbourg returned to music, performing the spoken word introduction to Madonna's "What It Feels Like for a Girl" in 2001 and lending backing vocals to Badly Drawn Boy's 2002 album Have You Fed the Fish? While appearing in projects such as Michel Gondry's The Science of Sleep, she began work on her second solo album, enlisting Air's Jean-Benoît Dunckel and Nicolas Godin as composers, Jarvis Cocker and the Divine Comedy's Neil Hannon as lyricists, and Nigel Godrich as producer. The results, 2006's 5:55, paid homage to her musical heritage and defined her as an artist and interpreter in her own right. 5:55 was released in the U.S. in spring 2007. ~ Heather Phares, All Music Guide