Death of Françoise Hardy: the French pop star and fashion icon was 80

Françoise Hardy, French singer, songwriter, fashion It Girl and darling of the French pop movement of the 1960s, has died. She was 80 years old.

His death was announced Tuesday on Instagram by his son, Thomas Dutronc, who wrote: Mom is gone Mom left in French without specifying when or where she died. Hardy said in 2004 that she was diagnosed with lymphoma.

A superstar in Paris at the age of 20, Hardy released his first single, All the Boys and Girls (All the Boys and Girls), in 1962. Over the next decades, she released more than 30 studio albums, a body of work that was briefly interrupted by retirement in the late 1980s.

Although she was hardly known in America, she sang most of her hits in her native language. Hardy was a phenomenon in his native country, regarded both for his minor lyricism and his delicate delivery. She followed her early success with Le Temps de Lamour, which featured spacious, echoing production that captured the spirit of Gene Pitney's sessions with Phil Spector. Songs like La Maison O Jai Grandi (The house where I grew up) and Comment te Dire Adieu (How to say goodbye) reflected on the absence of love and, once present, the futility of keeping it.

In music, above all, I like slow, sad melodies that rub salt in the wound. Not in a way that dives, but in a way that uplifts, Hardy said, according to Frdric Quinoneros' 2017 biography. I always yearn to find the heartbreaking melody that will bring tears to my eyes. A melody whose quality gives it a sacred dimension.

Often dismissed as an artist at the time due to her sex and beauty, a 1967 Reuters article identified her as France's long-haired, mini-skirted sexy idol Hardy, who relied on his skills as a writer and performer to render such simplistic descriptions moot. His looks and charisma, however, attracted the attention of musicians such as Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones' Brian Jones and French singer Jacques Dutronc.

In fact, many boomer music fans learned about Hardy not through a song, but by reading a Dylan poem on the back of his 1964 album, Another Side of Bob Dylan, in which the bard of Minnesota, apparently smitten, wrote (in lowercase) for Françoise Hardy. / at the edge of the Seines / a giant shadow / of Notre Dame / tries to catch my foot / students from the Sorbonne / twirl on thin bicycles…

Hardy parlayed her success in singing and songwriting in the early 1960s into becoming a renowned fashion icon, astrologer, and published author. She also appeared in several films, including Château en Sude (1963), What's New Pussycat? (1965) and Grand Prix (1966). Over the decades, her muse has steered her away from the commercial yy sound and toward pop-driven psychedelia, folk-rock, and meditative adult pop.

From the age of 18 she knew she was different, producer Erick Benzi, who worked with Hardy for two decades, said uncut in 2018. She was able to go in front of great artists like Charles Aznavour and say: Your song is shit, I don't want to sing it. She never compromised.

Born on January 17, 1944, during an air raid during the final months of the German occupation of France during World War II, Hardy grew out of an affair between her mother and a much older, well-off married man . His only sibling, Sister Michele, arrived a year later.

Despite his excellent academic performance and his father coming from a higher social status, Hardy faced an adult life similar to that of his middle-class peers. At one point when I was a teenager, she recalled in her 2008 memoir, The Despair of Monkeys and Other Trifles (published in the United States in 2018), my mother and I imagined all the realistic careers that offered to me: executive secretary, medical secretary, nurse, pharmacist. She added: Secretly, I harbored an ambition to find an activity that had connections to the musical style I had recently fallen in love with.

When she was a teenager, as a reward for her academic success, Hardy's mother and father gave her a gift of her choice. She oscillated between a radio and a guitar before opting for the latter. I'll never know why I chose a guitar because a transistor radio was all I ever wanted, it said the Guardian. My future life would flow from this crucial choice because, once I had this precious instrument in my hands, I began to strum three chords on which I sang snatches of my own melodies.

Alongside Jane Birkin, Brigitte Bardot, France Gall and Sylvie Vartan, Hardy became a star in her native Paris, attracting the attention of jet-setting pop stars, tastemakers and fashionistas from London, New York and Tokyo. As with other yy singers, Hardy's music blended mid-1960s bubblegum pop, groovy guitar lines, and the French romantic song tradition to create sweet, sticky love songs.

Hardy first visited Los Angeles in 1968 to record her English-language album En Anglais (in English), although she had appeared on screen at the Cinerama Dome two years earlier in the car film of John Frankenheimer Grand Prix race, but never seemed too concerned with success in the United States. It didn't help that she suffered from stage fright.

Her commanding presence caught the attention of the Paris fashion scene and she became the muse of designers such as André Courrges, Emmanuelle Khanh and Yves Saint Laurent. Louis Vuitton's current creative director, Nicolas Ghesquire, has called Hardy the very essence of French style, a trait apparent in the cover photos of Hardy's first four albums, which were taken by the fashion photographer (and then boyfriend) Jean-Marie Prier.

My songs had little interest compared to Anglo-Saxon production. So I took it to heart to dress well every time I went to London or New York, she confided to Vanity Fair in 2018, calling herself above all a fashion ambassador.

In the late 1960s, Hardy and Jacques Dutronc began a relationship that would last the rest of their lives. Their son, Thomas Dutronc, now a successful French singer, was born in 1973 and Hardy raised him while continuing to release some of his most voluminous albums. The title track of 73s Message Personnel (Personal Message) is a gentle exploration of unrequited love and unspoken emotions, enhanced with orchestral arrangements.

Hardy and Dutronc married in 1981 solely for tax reasons, both stressed but separated by 1988. Although they entered into other relationships, they never divorced and remained close. His extended family life had its share of tragedies. According to Hardy's memoir, in 1981 her father, with whom she had had little contact, was killed in his home by a prostitute. As she also explained in her memoir, in the mid-2000s, her sister, who had long suffered from mental illness, died. Although the police investigation never officially confirmed the cause, Hardy believed his sister had committed suicide.

Commercial success gave Hardy the opportunity and time to fully explore his creativity; one of the main paths was astrology. Introduced to the belief system in the 1960s, she immersed herself in the different schools of thought, eventually studying under French writer Jean-Pierre Nicola. Using her fame to advocate her methods, she eventually became Radio Monte Carlo's daily horoscope reader. She published her astrology book The Rhythms of the Zodiac in 2003.

Hardy published his first work of fiction, L'Amour Fou (Crazy Love) in 2012. Written to accompany an album of the same name, its success sustained his writing. Two books of essays followed in 2015 and 2016.

Hardy's political statements angered French liberals in 2012 when she said that if Socialist Party candidate François Hollande was able to launch his proposed 75% tax on millionaires, Hardy should sell my apartment, adding: “I will be in the street.

Hardy lived long enough to see his recordings rediscovered by a new generation of listeners. She sang on a remix of the Britpop group's 1994 song Blurs. Until the end, and continued to release albums and collaborate with others for the rest of his life. In 2015, respected archival label Light in the Attic reissued his first four albums. In 2021, Hardy and French house band Bon Entendeur released an updated version of his debut hit Le Temps de Lamour.

Nobody can sing like Françoise, Iggy Pop said in 1997 while he and Hardy were promoting their version of I'll see you. His emotional and musical accuracy combined with his sense of reserve and mysticism have an indelible and very French impact on the listener. There's no one as good around here.

“It’s always been a big surprise to me that people, even very good musicians, are moved by my voice,” Hardy told the Guardian. I know its limits, I always have. But I chose carefully. What a person sings is an expression of who they are. Luckily for me, the most beautiful songs aren't happy songs. The songs we remember are sad and romantic songs.

Hardy, who survived lymphatic cancer in the mid-2000s, was diagnosed with a malignant ear tumor in 2018. Later that year, she opened up about her situation. in an email to Femme Actuelle magazine: My physical suffering has already been so terrible that I fear that death will force me to endure even more physical suffering.

Pleading for her right to die, she writes: It is not up to doctors to grant every request, but to shorten the unnecessary suffering of an incurable illness from the moment it becomes unbearable.

For an artist long drawn to the ways people deal with grief and sadness, her plight seemed to fit the themes of her music.

I sing about death in a very symbolic and even positive way. There is acceptance there too, she told the Guardian. At my age, I can only really sing about this very special train that will take me out of this world. But of course, I also hope that it will send me to the stars and help me discover the mystery of the cosmos.

Hardy is survived by her husband and their son.