Legendary French singer Juliette Greco has died aged 93 after a career spanning over half a century, her family told AFP.
“Juliette Greco died yesterday surrounded by her family in the house she loved so much. Her life was one like no other,” her family said in a statement.
“She was still making French songs shine at the age of 89” when her career was ended by a stroke, it added.
“I miss it terribly. My reason for living is to sing! To sing is everything, there is the body, the instinct, the head,” she told the Telerama magazine in an interview in July.
She also lost her only daughter, Laurence-Marie, in 2016, the same year as the stroke.
“It is a very great woman who has left us,” Alexandre Baud, the producer of her final tour in 2015, told AFP.
“Juliette had been tired for some time, but she had kept her extremely sharp mind, as shown by her very open interview with Telerama,” he added.
[attach id=925537 size="medium" align="right" type="image"]Juliette Greco and Georges Brassens perform at Theatre National Populaire in Paris in September 1966..[/attach]
President Emmanuel Macron offered a generous tribute to Greco, a leading cultural figure in radical chic post-war Paris, praising her “elegance” and saying that in death she took her place in the “Pantheon of French chanson”.
“Juliette Greco joins (Jacques) Brel, (Léo) Ferré, (Georges) Brassens, (Charles) Aznavour ... in the pantheon of French chanson. her face and her voice will continue to accompany our lives. The ‘muse of Saint-Germain-des-Pres’ (a well-heeled Parisian suburb) is immortal,” Macron tweeted.
Usually clad in stylish but sombre black, Greco had debuted as a young dancer at the Paris ballet school when the Nazis invaded France. She was arrested and her older sister and her mother – a member of the French Resistance – were both sent to a concentration camp but survived and were liberated.
The lover of both Hollywood studio boss Darryl F Zanuck and jazz legend Miles Davis, Greco interpreted texts by the likes of Sartre, poets Jacques Prévert and Jean Cocteau, playwright Bertolt Brecht and composers such as Léo Ferré, Guy Béart, Georges Brassens and Serge Gainsbourg.
[attach id=925555 size="medium" align="right" type="image"] Juliette Greco in Jean Renoir's 1956 film Elena et les hommes.[/attach]
Her best-loved hits Jolie Mome (cute kid) by Ferré and Gainsbourg’s La Javanaise were written for her.
She compared singing to sex, suggesting that “an audience is like a lover. You have to start slowly, softly, with a thousand caresses, tears and doubts... then give everything so that they love you”. (AFP)