How to say goodbye to him? The singer Françoise Hardy, revealed in the 1960s by the tube All the boys and girlshas just passed away at the age of 80.
Françoise Hardy has taken off. The elegant singer, icon of the sixties, has just passed away, BFMTV learned from those close to her. The Frenchwoman with an iconic and timeless style, and leading face of the yé-yé movement, was 80 years old.
On social networks, his son Thomas Dutronc shared a photo of him very young alongside his mother, with a short message: “Mom is gone”.
The former companion of Jacques Dutronc, to whom we owe dozens of French variety hits including All the boys and girls, The time of loveor Personal messageannounced in June 2019 on RTL have a new cancer. Giving regular updates, Françoise Hardy announced last March that she would “never be able to sing again”.
“Deprived of saliva for three years by 45 radiotherapy sessions, I constantly have respiratory distress, attacks of suffocation and suffocation, not to mention endless nasal hemorrhages. I am not afraid of dying but I have very, very afraid of suffering, especially since that is already the case,” the singer described.
Lymphatic system cancer
She had fought for many years against lymphoma, a cancer of the lymphatic system. In 2015, in the middle of chemotherapy, after a fall and a period of artificial coma, the singer confided:
“I don’t know what made me finally come back to life. (…) It’s very strange because at the same time, I find that there would have been a coherence to what I died at that moment (…) I feel like I have professionally done everything I could do.”
She had returned to music, however, with the album Nobody elsein 2018 – the 28th – from which the farewell-shaped piece is extracted, The widesigned by La Grande Sophie.
For Françoise Hardy, it all started with Le Petit Conservatoire de la Chanson, by Mireille, in 1961.
A child at the end of the Second World War, Françoise Hardy was born on January 17, 1944 in Paris, in the 9th arrondissement, like Jacques Dutronc, Johnny Hallyday and Eddy Mitchell. Raised by her mother and grandmother, her absent father often forgetting to pay child support, the young girl, morbidly shy, spent a lonely and melancholic childhood, despite the presence of her little sister Michèle.
Too tall, too skinny
She grew up under the ridicule of her grandmother, “a grandmother who kept putting me down, telling me that I was worthless and that I was ugly,” she told Telerama. Françoise finds herself ugly, too tall, too thin.
Her only escape: reading and music, which make her dream of a life as an artist. When she obtained her baccalaureate in 1961, she asked for only one thing: a guitar. Self-taught, she learned a few chords and began singing lessons at the conservatory. At 17, she landed a contract with the record company Voguewho is then looking for a female version of Johnny Hallyday.
The success was immediate: in April 1962 she released her first 45 rpm single of 4 titles, and All the boys and girls sold more than two million copies. Despite her great shyness and the anxiety that makes her ill, she participates in the Eurovision contest with Love flies away. Although she only finished in fifth place, the show revealed her to the whole world: from the United Kingdom to Japan via the United States, everyone was a fan of the little French girl with such a sad look.
From Courrèges to Paco Rabanne
Very quickly, Françoise Hardy established herself as the idol of young people. Dressed by the most trendy designers of the time, from André Courrèges to Paco Rabanne (for whom she posed in an iconic golden mini-dress), she became a fashion reference of the 1960s, whose style still inspires fashion today like Jane Birkin and Brigitte Bardot.
Before meeting the man who would be the great love of her life, Françoise Hardy was engaged for a few years to the photographer Jean-Marie Perrier. “She was my fiancée for 5 years. I was 22, she was 17… She is the most beautiful person I have ever seen and she remains that way. She made me dream, she made me dream makes you laugh”, he confided in 2017 to The New Republic. However, she left him for Jacques Dutronc, with whom she became a couple in 1967. She gave birth to their child, Thomas, in 1973. That year, she recorded the album Personal messageproduced by Michel Berger and Serge Gainsbourg, from which the famous song of the same name is taken.
She then embodies a feminine ideal and makes Mick Jagger, David Bowie or Bob Dylan fantasize. “I remember that when I read in this magazine, Miss Tender Agethat I was Mick Jagger’s feminine ideal, I was in seventh heaven, because he was my masculine ideal!”, she delivered on the Couch by Marc-Olivier Fogiel, in 2017. “I was passionately in love with her for a very long time,” said David Bowie.
With Jacques Dutronc, the relationship, which lasted decades, was complicated. Because if the singer is completely “dependent” on her companion, he is very unavailable and has a series of conquests (including the actress Romy Schneider, met on the set of The important thing is to love). “Addicted”, Françoise Hardy did not dare to break up, and they finally married in 1981, before separating in 1988. “I told him, without believing it at all, you know, one day all this will not make me happy nor cold. And that’s exactly what happened one fine day, it was over, and then he had a hard time,” she said. Shein 2015. However, they remained friends, never divorced and would regularly spend vacations together thereafter, in Corsica, the setting of their first kisses.
“We also lived the best years of our youth together… You know, I’ve heard a lot that love lasts three years, but I can tell you that, for twenty years, I was completely crazy of my husband.”
Their story also inspired several songs, such as See you in another life, Or Nobody else.
“It did me a lot of good to put into words the frustrations and pains of my personal life, but it was also as beautiful and moving a message as possible that I addressed to the object of my torments”, had -she entrusted to Figaro Madam.
With Dutronc, he recorded, the superb duo Since you are going on a tripwhich appears on his album Chiaroscuroin 2000, alongside other duets with Etienne Daho (So Sad) or Iggy Pop (I’ll be seeing you). She also writes for others, such as Jean-Pierre Mader (In summary in conclusion), Julien Clerc (Fais-moi une place), or Guesh Patti or Patrick Juvet.
In 2006, she released an album of duets, Parenthesis, where she sang with Alain Bashung, Julio Iglésias, Alain Souchon, Benjamin Biolay, Henri Salvador…
Leave anyway
At the end of the 1960s, Françoise Hardy decided to stop performing. She subsequently focused on the recording of her tracks in the studio, the education of her son and her passion for astrology – she has written several books on the subject. His audience, always there, welcomes his albums with kindness (released in 1988, his opus Offsetscarried by the title Leave Anywayis gold disc). Nobody elsehis 28th and final album released on April 6, 2018, ranked second in the charts.
The album contains a song with a premonitory title, written for her by La Grande Sophie, “Le Large”. “And tomorrow everything will be fine, everything will be far away/There in the end when I set sail,” she sang in the chorus.
Nawal Bonnefoy with Hugues Garnier
