Born: January 17th, 1944
Died: June 11th, 2024
Françoise Hardy, who has died aged 80, shot to fame as part of France’s génération yé-yé, the 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 that set her apart: a wistfulness, a sentimental self-reflection, a poise that belied a lifelong shyness and insecurity. A 1960s icon, as big, for a while, in London as in Paris, Hardy was, in many ways, the antithesis of that restive, revolutionary decade.
Unlike her contemporaries, when she sang of love it was about “suffering and frustration, illusion and disillusion; wretched, profound, endless questioning”. Her songs, she told Le Monde, were a necessary outlet: “I wrote about my experience . . . A beautiful, melancholic melody is what best transcends the pain.”
Men fell in droves for her timid beauty. Mick Jagger described Hardy as his “ideal woman”. David Bowie, “passionately in love” for years, courted her backstage in dressing gown and embroidered slippers. In 1964, the sleeve notes of Another Side of Bob Dylan featured a whole poem “for françoise hardy/at the seine’s edge”. (Two years later, after a concert at the Olympia music hall in Paris, Dylan invited the singer to a party in his suite at the George V, one of the capital’s grandest hotels. In his bedroom, he played her two tracks from Blonde on Blonde: Just Like a Woman and I Want You. Hardy always insisted she was so starstruck she never got the message.)
But the love of Hardy’s life, the father of her son and the agonising 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, remaining on good terms. “Love is a remarkable force, even if its price is perpetual 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, was a company director who was married to another woman. Françoise grew up in a two-room apartment nearby with her sister, Michèle, born 18 months later, and a solitary mother with whom Françoise had a “fusional, symbiotic relationship”. The girls rarely saw their father, who often neglected to pay his share of their upkeep.
Shy, dreamy, deeply ashamed of her unconventional family, Hardy turned to the radio, where in the late 1950s, on the English service of Radio Luxembourg, she encountered a form of music – Presley, the Everly Brothers, Brenda Lee, Cliff Richard – that “affected me more than anything else. That ended up changing my life.”
Hardy’s contract with Vogue Records – who wanted “a female Johnny Hallyday” – was signed in November 1961. She made her first TV appearance six months later, and released her debut EP, featuring three songs of her own and a cover of a Bobby Lee Trammell song. Her breakthrough came, rather incongruously, on the night of Charles de Gaulle’s October 1962 referendum asking voters whether France’s future presidents should be directly elected. In a musical interlude while the nation awaited the result, Hardy performed a track from her EP, Tous les Garçons et les Filles. The nation loved it. The song became a monumental hit in France, spending a total of 15 weeks at No 1. Within weeks Hardy was on the cover of Paris Match, plunged, still in her teens, into the whirlwind of the Swinging Sixties (which she detested: she disapproved of casual sex, avoided drugs, and could only ever remember being drunk twice).
Her first boyfriend, the photographer Jean-Marie Périer, ensured her picture – miniskirt, white boots, long hair, signature fringe – 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 at the end of the 1960s, barely five years after she began, Hardy abruptly gave up the cinema and performing live. “I hated what it all involved,” she explained. “Being separated from the man I loved, the waiting, the solitude, depending on the phone. And I’ve never been able to act. I can’t simulate, or lie. Songwriting, on the other hand . . . dives deep.” Life in the fast lane, she declared, was “a gilded prison”.
But she continued recording, releasing a dozen bestselling albums in France. She duetted with the French artists Henri Salvador, Alain Souchon and Benjamin Biolay, and later with Damon Albarn and Iggy Pop.
She continued to work in later life. A string 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, appeared despite family and personal tragedies: Hardy was at her mother’s side when, suffering from Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, she died by euthanasia in 1994.
Hardy herself was diagnosed with lymphoma in 2004 and again with another tumour in 2018. In 2021, she said that she would like to be able to choose to end her life, as her mother had done.
In 2018, Hardy told the Observer she had always been surprised that people – “even very good musicians” – had been moved by her voice.
“I know its limitations, I always have,” she said. “But I have chosen carefully. What a person sings is an expression of what they are. Luckily for me, the most beautiful songs are not happy songs. The songs we remember are the sad, romantic songs.”
She is survived by Dutronc, and by their son, Thomas.