RIP Françoise Hardy

 

Françoise Hardy, the idol of the yé-yé, has died at the age of 80

Françoise Hardy has passed away at the age of 80, her son Thomas Dutronc announced on Tuesday evening. From Salut les copains to the 2020s, the singer, inseparable from her husband Jacques Dutronc, has crossed the eras and rubbed shoulders with the greatest.

Dernieres Nouvelles d’Alsace

By V.M.M.

June 10, 2022

 

The singer of the yé-yé, Françoise Hardy, has died at the age of 80, her son Thomas Dutronc announced on Facebook. She was suffering from cancer and said she had suffered a lot in recent years.

Already in 2021, she confided that she "felt close to the end": "Since the diagnosis, radiotherapies and immunotherapies have had nightmarish side effects that are ruining my life and weakening me more and more." And in 2023, she campaigned for the legalization of assisted dying, affirming her desire to "leave as soon and as quickly as possible."

"I am a miracle worker." In an interview given in June 2016, Françoise Hardy did not beat around the bush. In no uncertain terms, she recounted her remission from cancer of the lymphatic system. She was enjoying her 17 kilos after a hell at 39 kilos. "I'm a big don!" she laughed, as if to convince her audience.

However, after 28 albums (her latest, Personne d'autre, dates back to 2018) and more than 60 years of career, it was hard to find her really changed. Always that androgynous twig with bangs that eats his eyes. Melancholic voice. Sad look.

A referendum night

Françoise, the unloved, grew up convinced that she was insignificant, suffering from the absence of a bisexual father married to a woman other than her mother.

Writing is his catharsis. So when her face appeared on television on a referendum night in the fall of 1962, she hummed her own words: "All the boys and girls my age... »

The general public discovered Miss Hardy. Paris Match chose her two months later to make its front page.

Fashion Idol

Consecrated as the new idol of song, she joined the yé-yé wave and her Salut les Copains generation and fell in love with the band's photographer, Jean-Marie Périer.

Mini-skirt, boots, her look inspires Courrèges, Paco Rabanne, Saint-Laurent... She wears the most expensive mini-dress in the world or the timeless tuxedo for them. Mick Jagger is making eyes at him. She embodies his ideal woman.

A Personal Message to Jacques

Her slender beauty crossed paths with the camera of Claude Lelouch, then unknown, who made her shoot one of the first scopitones, the ancestor of music videos. Roger Vadim noticed her and made her film debut.

In 1967, his life was turned upside down in Corsica. The sentimental Françoise falls under the spell of the unfaithful Dutronc. "I don't fall in love often. But each time, I like one-way. I always meet boys who only think about themselves. Very self-centered. She then sang Il n'y a pas d'amour heureux, taken from a poem by Aragon.

Two years later, Serge Gainsbourg composed How to Say Goodbye for her and Michel Berger wrote a personal message for her in 1973: "If you believe one day that you love me..."

A masochistic relationship

“It did me a lot of good to put into words the frustrations and pains of my personal life, but it was also a message as beautiful and moving as possible that I was sending to the object of my torment,” Françoise Hardy told AFP in 2021.

With Jacques, her inseparable double, she maintains a fusional and masochistic relationship that leads to a marriage and a son, Thomas. Between them, it’s life and death.

In their large Parisian apartment, they are on a separate floor. In Corsica, Jacques has been living with another woman for 20 years. But these two remain inseparable. They will never divorce. “If one of the two dies, the other will not take long to follow,” she confided to Marc-Olivier Fogiel on her couch in February 2016.

Each one claims in the press to have “long” relationships with other people. However, the bond that unites them remains stronger.

Over the years, Françoise Hardy has developed a speciality other than music: astrology. She has published several books on the subject.

Two resurrections

When she was diagnosed with cancer in 2004, Françoise Hardy took it philosophically. The artist is in the middle of a winning comeback after turning her back on music for a while, convinced that she "couldn't do better".

She is coping well with her first chemotherapy. Weary! His general health is gradually deteriorating. In the spring of 2015, after falling in her shower, she fell into a coma. Thomas urges Jacques to come to his bedside.

"This is the end," say the doctors. They are mistaken. She woke up three weeks later: "I came back to life, but it's very strange, because I think there would have been a coherence in me dying at that moment."

"Illness destroys the mind"

In January 2024, his friend Etienne Daho confided, in the show En Aparté, that "it's very hard not to be able to do anything to relieve your suffering. It's very difficult. I think she doesn't deserve an ending like that really, well, no one deserves an ending like that... She is really in a state of suffering that pains me enormously. »

"Illness destroys the mind," she said in Paris Match at the end of 2023. "With age, after rays that hit the head, which was the case with my 55 radiotherapies, you lose the memory of too many things and the lack of balance reduces the possibility of moving as much as possible."

As she wrote in 1988, in Partir quand même, co-written with Jacques Dutronc: "Leave anyway, leave first, leave the stage in a last effort before saying 'I love you', let the trap close, leave anyway."

The icon bowed out on that June night. Françoise, how can I say goodbye to you?

HARDY, Françoise (Françoise Madeleine Hardy)

Born: 1/17/1944, Paris, Île-de-France, France

Died: 6/11/2024

 

Françoise Hardy’s westerns – actress, singer:

A Fistful of Songs – 1966 (performer) [sings: “Parla mi di te”]

The Man Who Came from Cher (TV) – 1969 (Suzanne) [sings: “Comment te dire adieu”]