Françoise Hardy, French singer and actress who became an international icon in the 1960s, dies at the age of 80

Françoise Hardy, a French singer, actress and model whose classical beauty and often melancholy music captivated fans around the world in the 1960s and beyond, has died at the age of 80.

Her son Thomas Dutronc, also a musician, reported the death on his Instagram account, posted a baby photo of himself with his mother and wrote: “Maman est party.” Or: Mom is gone.

Hardy has battled lymphoma and throat cancer for the past two decades since he was first diagnosed with the disease in 2004.

As a sign of her enduring legendary status, Rolling Stone magazine ranked Hardy 162nd in a 2023 ranking of the greatest female singers of all time. She was the only French artist on the list. Will Hermes wrote that Hardy “embodied French cool and Gallic heat simultaneously, with a breathy, deadpan contralto that wafted like Gauloises smoke. Her words underlined her tone: She wrote her own material, which was unusual in the early ’60s, especially for women, and also recorded works by masters such as Serge Gainsbourg, and her interpretation of Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” may be the most evocative ever recorded, his included.” Hermes wrote that her dozens of album releases “still make existentialism sound incredibly elegant.”

Hardy also became a model, for designers such as Yves Saint Laurent, and an actress. American audiences probably remember her best for John Frankenheimer’s “Grand Prix” in 1966. Her film appearances spanned 13 years, from “Castle in Sweden” (1963) to her 1976 swan song, Claude Lelouch’s “If It Had to Be Done Again.” Other acting roles included “A Bullet in the Heart” and a cameo in “What’s New, Pussycat?”

“I was very naive and a well-bred young woman,” Hardy told the New York Times in 2018, describing a film career for which she felt unsuited. “I couldn’t imagine turning down offers from well-known film directors. However, I preferred music much more than cinema. Music and chanson allow you to go deep into yourself and your feelings, whereas cinema is about playing a role, playing a character that can be miles away from yourself.”

Hardy had her first music hit, “Tous les Garcons et les Filles” (“All the Boys and Girls”), in 1962, when she was just 18. Her biggest English-language hit came in 1968 with “It Hurts to Say Goodbye”, written by Serge Gainsbourg, which reached number 1 in both the UK and her native France.

She sang in French, English, Italian and German and attracted admirers from the ranks of the world’s biggest stars. Bob Dylan was one of her admirers and addressed her with a poem on the back cover of his early album, “Another Side of Bob Dylan.” When he came to Paris to give his first concert there, Hardy recalls, he refused to return to the stage unless she agreed to meet him.

In 2018, after going through another series of health problems, Hardy made her final comeback: she published her autobiography “The Despair of Monkeys and Other Trifles” and released her 28th new album “Personne d’Autre” (“Nobody Else”).

The press campaign she conducted to promote these projects represented a significant turnaround from her situation just two years earlier, when she had been placed in an artificial coma and was not expected to be resuscitated.

Hardy continued to be interested in music in her later years, and in 2017 her name appeared on the website Talkhouse, where she extensively praised the band Cigarettes After Sex.

“It was a real lightning strike: it was exactly the music I prefer and have been looking for all my life,” she wrote of the group. “If anything can define me and my songs, it is romantic loneliness. It probably has something to do with the lyrics, but what all the songs of Cigarettes After Sex mean to me has more to do with love, sensuality, tenderness, beauty and melancholy than with the opposites of these things. I don’t have that many really sensual songs, and all of Greg’s songs are sensual… just some of me are like this.”

She spoke of her joy when she learned that Cigarettes After Sex singer Greg Gonzales was a fan of hers, and was thrilled to be able to meet the band for dinner in Paris. “Here in Corsica, I want my husband and our friends to like this music as much as I do, so I play it over and over again, as loudly as possible. Although I feel very young in my mind, I am now unfortunately too old to play the music of Cigarettes After Sex during a romantic night with a ‘fiancé’ – as many of her other fans surely do,” she wrote.

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