Françoise Hardy, beloved French singer and fashion icon, has died at the age of 80

French pop singer, actress and model Françoise Hardy died on Tuesday (June 11th) at the age of 80 after a long battle with cancer. Her son, musician Thomas Dutronc, announced her death in an emotional post on Instagram, with a photo of him as a baby in his mother's arms with the message “Maman est party (mom is gone).

One of the most versatile and beloved French artists of her generation, Hardy went public with her diagnosis of lymphatic cancer in 2004 and was briefly put into an induced coma in 2015 when her condition worsened.

Hardy was born in Paris on January 17, 1944, in the midst of an air raid on the Nazi-occupied city, and by most accounts had a melancholy childhood, the spell of which was broken when her absentee father gave her a guitar after she graduated from high school. at 16. The singer got her break in 1961 when the then 18-year-old was signed to the Disques Vogue label and released the single “Tous les garçons et les filles”, which became an instant hit and sold more than 2.5 million copies.

Best known for her melancholic ballads, Hardy became one of the leading lights of the Yé-yé style of music, the name of which was a spin on the frequent “yeah, yeah” chants in English-language pop songs of the time by her ilk. Beetles. More hits followed, including “Je Suis D'Accord” and “Le Temps de L'Amour” and in 1963 Hardy came fifth as Monaco's entry in that year's Eurovision Song Contest.

With her sleek, androgynous good looks and a brooding, breathy style that resonated with young audiences thanks to lyrics about the pain and angst of adolescence, films came calling and director Roger Vadim cast her in the 1963 comedy. Château en Suède (Nutty, Naughty Chateau), alongside established star Monica Vitti. As evidence of her growing popularity, Hardy began translating her songs into English (as well as German and Italian), scoring her first UK Top 20 hit in 1964 with “All Over the World”.

In addition to influencing (and being admired by) everyone from Bob Dylan to Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones, Hardy also became a muse for fashion designers Yves Saint Laurent and Paco Rabanne, with famous photographers Richard Avedon and William Klein to shoot her. the years. Dylan was so taken by her, in fact, that in the liner notes of 1964 Another side of Bob Dylan album included a poem in her honor that began, “For Françoise Hardy, on the edge of the Seine, a giant shadow of Notre-Dame seeks to seize my foot.”

David Bowie was outraged, once saying that he “was passionately in love with her. All the males in the world, and many females, were too.'

After releasing a series of albums and EPs in France, Hardy's first full-length US release was in 1965, The “Yeh-Yeh” girl from Paris!a repackage of her 1962 French debut album, Tous les garçons et les filles; Her first albums were often released without titles and were often known by their most popular tracks. Her first English-language album, in 1965 In English, featured “All Over the World” and a number of other songs she co-wrote with her partner Julian More, including “This Little Heart”, “The Rose” and “Another Place”. It was followed in 1968 by another English album known as The second English album and You will love me tomorrow. She scored her biggest English-language hit in 1968 with the Serge Gainsbourg-penned 'It Hurts to Say Goodbye', which reached No. 1 in France and the UK.

Working with a range of collaborators throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, Hardy released a dozen albums exploring Brazilian funk, rock, disco, jazz and electronic pop before taking a six-year hiatus before 1988 . Decalages LP, which was followed in 1996 by The danger, which she said at the time would be her last album. She continued to release albums in the early 2000s, however, releasing her 28th and final studio compilation, Personne d'autrein 2018.

Speaking to Associated Press in 1996, she explained her unusual approach to songwriting, in which she emphasized the importance of melody. “I always put the words to the music. It's always like this. I don't write before, and then I look for music,” she said of the era of the method that gave her songs a unique quality by mixing poetry-like lyrics with catchy melodies. “First, I take the music and (then) try to put words to it.”

As well as working with everyone from Iggy Pop to Blur, Hardy also appeared in films by such acclaimed directors as Jean-Luc Godard (1966 Male Female) and John Frankenheimer (Grand Prix). The singer also developed an interest in astrology, writing a series of books on the subject, as well as publishing novels and her autobiography, The despair of monkeys and other triflesin 2018. She was the only French singer named Rolling rock2023 list of the 200 Greatest Singers of All Time, coming in at No. 162 thanks to what the magazine said was “a breathy, deadpan who also smoked Gauloises.”

Check out Dutronc's post and some of Hardy's renditions below.