French singer who found fame a ‘golden prison’ – The Irish Times

Born: 17 January 1944

Died: June 11, 2024

Françoise Hardy, who has died aged 80, rose to fame as part of France’s Génération yé-yé, that jaunty transatlantic and cross-Channel collision between French chanson and American rock’n’roll that also produced Johnny Hallyday and France Gall. But from the start there was something about her that set her apart: a wistfulness, a sentimental self-reflection, an attitude that belied a lifetime of shyness and insecurity. Hardy was an icon of the 1960s, for a time as big in London as she was in Paris, and in many ways she was the antithesis of that turbulent, revolutionary decade.

Unlike her contemporaries, when she sang about love, she sang about it: “pain and frustration, illusion and disillusionment; miserable, profound, endless questioning.” Her songs, she told Le Monde, were a necessary outlet: “I wrote about my experiences… A beautiful, melancholy melody is the best thing that overcomes pain.”

Men fell in droves for her shy beauty. Mick Jagger called Hardy his “ideal woman.” David Bowie, who had been “passionately in love” for years, courted her backstage in a dressing gown and embroidered slippers. In 1964, the cover lyrics of Another Side of Bob Dylan included an entire poem: “for françoise hardy/at the seine’s edge.” (Two years later, after a concert at Paris’ Olympia music hall, Dylan invited the singer to a party in his suite at the George V, one of the capital’s most exclusive hotels. In his bedroom, he played her two tracks from Blonde on Blonde: Just Like a Woman and I Want You. Hardy always insisted that she was so fascinated by the star that she never understood the message.)

But the love of her life, the father of her son and the painful inspiration for many of her songs, was the French singer and actor Jacques Dutronc, whom she met in 1967 and married in 1981. The couple separated in the 1990s but never divorced and remained on good terms. “Love is a remarkable power, even if its price is eternal torment,” she said. “But without that torment, I would not have written a single lyric.”

Hardy was born in Nazi-occupied Paris. Her mother was Madeleine Hardy, an accountant, and her father, Pierre Dillard, a company director married to another woman. Françoise grew up in a two-room apartment nearby with her sister Michèle, born 18 months later, and a single mother with whom Françoise had a “fusional, symbiotic relationship.” The girls rarely saw their father, who often neglected to pay his share of their maintenance.

Shy, dreamy and deeply ashamed of her unconventional family, Hardy turned to radio, where in the late 1950s she discovered on the English program of Radio Luxembourg a kind of music – Presley, the Everly Brothers, Brenda Lee, Cliff Richard – that “touched me more than anything else. It ultimately changed my life.”

Hardy’s contract with Vogue Records – who wanted “a female Johnny Hallyday” – was signed in November 1961. Six months later, she made her first television appearance and released her first EP, which included three original songs and a cover of a Bobby Lee Trammell song. Her breakthrough came, rather inconveniently, on the night of Charles de Gaulle’s referendum in October 1962, which asked voters whether France’s future presidents should be directly elected. As the nation awaited the result, Hardy performed a track from her EP, Tous les Garçons et les Filles, in a musical interlude. The nation was delighted. The song became a monumental hit in France, staying at number one for a total of 15 weeks. Within weeks, Hardy was on the cover of Paris Match and, still a teenager, was thrown into the whirlwind of the Swinging Sixties (which she detested: she disapproved of casual sex, avoided drugs and could only remember ever being drunk twice).

Her first boyfriend, the photographer Jean-Marie Périer, made sure that her image – miniskirt, white boots, long hair, characteristic bangs – went around the world. Courrèges, Yves Saint Laurent and Paco Rabanne competed to dress her; William Klein photographed her for Vogue. Roger Vadim, Jean-Luc Godard and John Frankenheimer cast her in films. The hits flowed, some written by Hardy, others not.

But in the late 1960s, barely five years after she began, Hardy abruptly gave up the movies and live performances. “I hated what it all entailed,” she explained. “Being away from the man I loved, the waiting, the loneliness, being dependent on the telephone. And I could never act. I can’t fake or lie. Songwriting, on the other hand… goes deep.” Life in the fast lane, she explained, was “a gilded prison.”

However, she continued to record and released a dozen best-selling albums in France. She sang duets with French artists Henri Salvador, Alain Souchon and Benjamin Biolay, and later with Damon Albarn and Iggy Pop.

She continued to work later in life, too. A series of new recordings in the 1990s and 2000s, a 2008 autobiography, Le Désespoir des Singes, and her last album, Personne d’autre, released in 2018, came despite family and personal tragedies: Hardy was at her mother’s side when she suffered from Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease in 1994 and died by euthanasia.

Hardy herself was diagnosed with lymphoma in 2004 and again with another tumor in 2018. In 2021, she said she would like to have the choice to end her life, as her mother had.

In 2018, Hardy told the Observer that she was continually surprised that people – “even very good musicians” – were moved by her voice.

“I know his limitations, I always have,” she said. “But I chose carefully. What a person sings is an expression of his personality. Fortunately for me, the most beautiful songs are not happy songs. The songs we remember are the sad, romantic songs.”

She leaves behind Dutronc and her son Thomas.