One of France’s best-loved singer-songwriters, Françoise Hardy, has died at the age of 80.
“Mum is gone,” her son, Thomas Dutronc, who is also a musician, wrote on social media.
Hardy burst onto the music scene in 1962 and became a cultural icon, inspiring artists such as Mick Jagger and Bob Dylan. Known for her melancholic ballads, she epitomized France’s Yé-yé (yeah yeah) pop movement, which was influenced by English music.
Her most famous songs included “All the Girls and Boys” (“Tous les garçons et les filles”), “It Hurts to Say Goodbye” (“Comment te dire adieu”), and “My Friend the Rose” (“Mon amie la rose”).
Her biggest UK hit was “All Over The World,” an English-language version of her song “Dans le monde entier,” which reached number 16 on the charts in June 1965.
Born in Nazi-occupied Paris in 1944, Hardy was raised by her mother.
Like many girls of her time, she grew up listening to Elvis Presley, Cliff Richard, and other American and British stars on Radio Luxembourg, signing her first record deal at just 17.
Her breakthrough came in 1962 with the simple, plaintive song “Tous les garçons et les filles,” where she sang about all the boys and girls walking hand in hand while she walked alone, her heart aching. It was an instant hit in France and even broke into the UK charts.
Her style captivated fashion designers, and she became a model for designers like Yves Saint Laurent and Paco Rabanne, who designed a minidress out of gold plates for her.
Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger famously called her the “ideal woman,” while singer-songwriter Bob Dylan wrote several love letters to her and addressed her in a poem on the back of his 1964 album “Another Side of Bob Dylan.”
One of her most memorable performances came in 1968 with Comment te dire adieu, a French adaptation by Serge Gainsbourg of a song originally in English. But the Gainsbourg song has since been covered many times, with its painful goodbye to a man with a “heart of pyrex”.
She collaborated with numerous artists, including Blur and Iggy Pop.
Hardy was also an actress, appearing in films by directors such as Jean-Luc Godard, Roger Vadim, and John Frankenheimer. Additionally, she was a writer of both fiction and non-fiction.
Among the subjects she wrote about was astrology, a passion she developed during the 1970s.
She was married once, to singer Jacques Dutronc, with whom she had a son, Thomas. They separated in the late 1980s, but she often referred to her ex-husband as the love of her life.
Hardy had been ill for some time before her death, revealing in 2004 that she had been diagnosed with lymphoma.
In 2015, she was placed in an induced coma for weeks following a fall, and in 2021, she disclosed that she had cancer in one of her ears and felt “close to the end” of her life.
Her career spanned more than five decades, during which she released nearly 30 albums. Hardy’s last album, “Personne D’Autre” (Nobody Else), was released in 2018.
Rolling Stone ranked her at number 162 on its list of the 200 Greatest Singers of All Time in 2023.
Among those to pay tribute to Hardy following news of her death was France’s Culture Minister, Rachida Dati, who wrote on social media: “How to say goodbye to her? Eternal Françoise Hardy, legend of French song, who entered, through her sensitivity and her melodies, into the heart of an entire country.”