the most private star; The only child of the iconic couple Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg, Charlotte Gainsbourg has made her mark as a serious actress and a unique presence on the French scene.

Byline: Joan Juliet Buck

She's been an actress since she was twelve, when she also recorded "Lemon Incest," a duet with her father, Serge Gainsbourg, in which the chorus goes "pa-papa-pa." The child voice that sang the lyrics translated as "the love that

we will never make is the most beautiful, the most violent, the purest" is breathy and gentle like that of her mother, Jane Birkin, who recorded

equally shocking songs with him. Her father called her an "exquisite sketch," and at 35, Charlotte Gainsbourg is still a kind of sketch, a few simple strokes in black ink: dark hair, wide eyebrows, no makeup at all, a black tank top, jeans, flats, flawless skin evenly tanned, a tiny clear plastic nicotine patch gleaming high on her left arm. "I take it off at night," she says in French, "because dreams with the patch are hallucinations." She has lived with the actor-director Yvan Attal since she was 20, and they have two children.

This August her first solo CD, 5.55, was released by Atlantic, in En_glish. It's a hypnotic series of melancholy, beautiful odes to, among other things, insomnia. "Mine is a fake insomnia," says Gainsbourg. "I like to be awake when everyone is asleep."

The producer Nigel Godrich (Radiohead, Beck) heard her sing on a film sound track, and said he wanted to work with "that girl." The anonymity of that choice pleased her. Over the course of two years he brought her together with Jarvis Cocker and Air. "I always wanted to work with Air, and by singing in English I had more freedom. I didn't want to go into the studio, but it was very personal and intimate, and I found things I was close to even if I didn't write the words or the music."

She has made 33 films. On-screen she looks as if she wants to flee; she covers