The actress Geneviève Grad, interpreter of the famous “Douliou douliou Saint-Tropez”, song from the film The policeman of Saint-Tropez with Louis de Funès, died at the age of 80 on the night of Thursday to Friday, her husband told AFP.
The actress passed away at the Blois Polyclinic (Loir-et-Cher) “at the end of a courageous fight against cancer,” said her husband, Jean Guillaume.
The general public becomes familiar with her face through the role of the daughter of the chief quartermaster Cruchot, played by Louis de Funès in the series of successful films of the Gendarmes: The policeman of Saint-Tropez (1964), The Constable in New York (1965), The policeman gets married (1968).
In the first part, Geneviève Grad herself sings “Douliou douliou Saint-Tropez”, a pop song that has gone down in history and is often misspelled as “Do you do you Saint-Tropez”.
His career in front of the camera is, however, broader than this period, since his first major role was in Captain Fracasse (1961), with Jean Marais. She also made appearances in Italian adventure films in the 1960s.
The one who trained as a dancer at the Paris Opera until her adolescence experienced a slow career in the 1970s and turned her back on cinema in the early 1980s.
We find her as a production assistant in the anticipation TV show Time of the Bogdanoff brothers, the most famous twins on the French small screen, in the 1980s. She will also have a son with Igor, one of them.
She had been married for around thirty years to Jean Guillaume and until recently, according to the latter, received two to three requests for dedications by mail from “Germany, Russia or Ukraine”.