One of France’s most beloved singer-songwriters, Françoise Hardy, has died at the age of 80.
“Mom is gone,” her son, Thomas Dutronc, also a musician, wrote on social networks.
Hardy burst onto the music scene in 1962 and became a cultural icon who inspired Mick Jagger and Bob Dylan. Known for her melancholic ballads, she symbolized France Ye-ye (yeah yeah) pop movement, so called because of its nod to English music.
His most famous songs include All the Girls and Boys, It Hurts to Say Goodbye and My Friend the Rose.
His biggest hit in the UK was All Over The World, an English version of his song All Over the World, which reached number 16 in the charts in June 1965.
Hardy was born in Nazi-occupied Paris in 1944 and was raised by her mother.
Like many girls at the time, she grew up listening to Elvis Presley, Cliff Richard and other American and British stars on Radio Luxembourg and she signed her first recording contract at just 17 years old.
Her rise as a musician came in 1962 with the simple, plaintive song All the Boys and Girls, where she sang of all the boys and girls walking hand in hand, while “I walk the streets alone, heart tight”. It was an instant hit in France and even broke into the British charts.
Her style captivated fashion designers, becoming a model for Yves Saint Laurent and Paco Rabanne, who designed a gold plate mini dress for her.
Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger once called her “the ideal woman”, while fellow singer-songwriter Bob Dylan wrote her several love letters.
He addressed her in a poem on the back of his 1964 album Another Side of Bob Dylan.
One of his most memorable performances took place in 1968 with Comment te dire adieu, a French adaptation by Serge Gainsbourg of a song originally in English. But Gainsbourg’s song has since been covered many times, with its painful farewell to a man with a “heart of Pyrex”.
She has collaborated with many artists, including Blur and Iggy Pop.
Hardy was also an actor – appearing in films by directors such as Jean-Luc Godard, Roger Vadim and John Frankenheimer – as well as a writer of fiction and non-fiction.
Among the subjects she wrote about was astrology, for which she developed a passion in the 1970s.
She was married once to the singer Jacques Dutronc, with whom she had her son Thomas. They separated in the late 1980s, but she often called her ex-husband the love of her life.
Hardy had been ill for some time before his death, revealing in 2004 that he had been diagnosed with lymphoma.
In 2015, she was placed in an induced coma for weeks following a fall and in 2021, she reported having cancer in one of her ears and feeling “close to the end” of her life.
Her career spans more than five decades, during which she has released nearly 30 albums. Hardy’s latest album, Personne D’Autre, was released in 2018.
Rolling Stone ranked her 162nd on its list of the 200 Greatest Singers of All Time in 2023.
Among those who paid tribute to Hardy after the announcement of his death, the French Minister of Culture, Rachida Dati, wrote on social networks: “How to say goodbye to him? The eternal Françoise Hardy, legend of the song French, who entered, through her sensitivity and her melodies, into the heart of an entire country.
