Édith Piaf French Singer Born 1915 in Paris

Early life

Édith Giovanna Gassion was born in Paris on 19 December 1915. Her father, Louis Gassion, was an acrobat and street performer from Normandy, and her mother, who performed under the name Line Marsa, was a singer and circus artist. Her given name was chosen in memory of the British nurse Edith Cavell, who had been executed shortly before her birth.

Her mother left early, and her father joined the army in 1916. As a girl she was raised in Bernay, in Normandy, in the household of her paternal grandmother.

Career

At fourteen she began travelling with her father and performing in the streets of France, where she first sang in public. With a friend, Simone Berteaut, she then sang in the streets and courtyards of Paris and its suburbs. In 1935 the nightclub owner Louis Leplée heard her and gave her a place in his club. He gave her the nickname La Môme Piaf, meaning roughly "the sparrow kid", and advised her to wear a black dress, which became her usual stage costume. Her first recordings followed the same year, one of them written by Marguerite Monnot, who remained a close collaborator. After Leplée's death in 1936, the lyricist Raymond Asso helped rebuild her career, and her stage name became Édith Piaf.

In 1940 she appeared in Jean Cocteau's one-act play Le Bel Indifférent, and her popularity grew through the years of the Second World War. In the late 1940s she was among the best-known entertainers in France. She toured Europe, South America and the United States, where a favourable review by the critic Virgil Thomson in 1947 helped win over American audiences. She appeared eight times on The Ed Sullivan Show and played Carnegie Hall in 1956 and 1957. She also supported younger performers: she gave the Argentine singer Atahualpa Yupanqui a Paris debut in 1950 and took Charles Aznavour on tour and recorded some of his songs.

Her best-known songs include "La Vie en rose", "Hymne à l'amour", "Milord", "La Foule", "L'Accordéoniste" and "Non, je ne regrette rien", which she first sang in 1961 during a run of concerts at the Paris Olympia. She performed there in several series between 1955 and 1962, and excerpts from five of those engagements were issued as recordings that have stayed in print. Her songs often drew on love and loss, and her repertoire centred on the realist chanson and torch ballad.

On screen she had a smaller career. Her nine credits begin with La Garçonne in 1936 and include Montmartre-sur-Seine (1941), Boum sur Paris (1954), Royal Affairs in Versailles (1954) and French Cancan (1955). She recorded her last song, "L'Homme de Berlin", in early 1963 with her husband Théo Sarapo.

Recognition

"La Vie en rose" entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1998. Her recordings have earned silver, gold and platinum records. Her life has been the subject of many films, documentaries and plays, among them the 2007 film La Vie en Rose, for which Marion Cotillard won the Academy Award for Best Actress. In Paris, a place in the Belleville district carries her name, and the Association of the Friends of Édith Piaf was founded in 1967. A small planet, 3772 Piaf, was named after her. In 2013 a Requiem Mass was held for her at the church of her birth parish in Belleville, fifty years after her funeral, at which the Catholic Church had denied her one.

Personal life

In 1947 she met the French boxer Marcel Cerdan; she recorded "Hymne à l'amour" in 1950 in his memory. Her first husband was the singer Jacques Pills, whom she married in 1952. In 1962 she married Théo Sarapo, a singer and actor of Greek descent, who was about twenty years younger than she was. She died on 10 October 1963 and is buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, where her grave is among the most visited. Tens of thousands of people lined the streets for her funeral procession.