Paris, June 12 (EFE).- Singer Françoise Hardy, one of France’s most successful pop stars and muse to musicians and fashion designers, has died at the age of 80.
Her son Thomas Dutronc announced the news on social media on Wednesday, writing “Maman est partie” (Mom is gone) in a post accompanied by a photo of her holding him as a baby.
Around 2004 Hardy was diagnosed with lymphoma and in 2015 was put into an induced coma after her condition worsened. In 2019 she revealed she had throat cancer.
Having undergone years of painful treatments and eventually finding it difficult to talk and unable to sing, she publicly advocated for assisted death, saying in a 2021 interview that France was “inhumane” for not legalizing the procedure.
Hardy was born in Nazi-occupied Paris, France, in 1944, was given her first guitar at age 16 and signed with Disques Vogue in 1961.
The following year, she found fame at the age of 18 with the song “Tous les garçons et les filles,” putting her at the forefront of the yé-yé pop phenomenon.
From then on, she released more than 30 studio albums, three of them in English, with her last album in 2018.
She composed most of the material she sang, unusual at the time, and performed in French, English, Italian and German, which made her famous from the United States to Japan, and covered by admiring artists in the 80s.
Hardy took on various acting roles in the 1960s, including “Château en Suède,” “Une balle au cœur,” “Grand Prix” and “Masculin féminin.”
She was also a muse of Yves Saint Laurent and Paco Rabanne, and attracted admiration from Mick Jagger and David Bowie as well as Bob Dylan, who wrote in the liner notes of his 1964 album “Another Side of Bob Dylan”: “For Françoise Hardy, at the Seine’s edge, a giant shadow of Notre Dame seeks t’ grab my foot …”
She met musician and actor Jacques Dutronc in 1967, and they married in 1981. Although they have been separated since 1988, they never divorced. EFE
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