This simple touching message from her son, Thomas Dutronc, announced to the world that acclaimed singer Françoise Hardy had passed away on 11 June 2024 at the age of 80 following her long battle with cancer of the larynx.
OBITUARY by Chris Moule
Françoise Madeleine Hardy was born on 17 January 1944 in Paris, in German-occupied France during World War II. Her mother Madeleine Hardy, who came from an ordinary background, raised Françoise and her younger sister Michèle as a single parent. Their father Étienne Dillard – a married man who came from a much wealthier family – did little to help them. Madeleine Hardy raised her daughters strictly. Françoise had an unhappy childhood, mainly engaging in solitary activities like reading, playing with dolls or listening to the radio. At the insistence of their father, the girls went to a Catholic school run by Trinitarian nuns. The differences in social origin between Hardy and her classmates was a constant humiliation for her. Her lifelong insecurities were also fuelled by her regular visits to her maternal grandmother who told her repeatedly that she was unattractive and a very bad person. Between 1952 and 1960, Françoise and her sister were sent every summer to Austria to learn German, encouraged by her mother’s new lover, an Austrian baron. As her father played piano, Françoise was encouraged to receive piano lessons as a very young child, though she quickly dropped out after experiencing stage fright when she was supposed to display her talents onstage.
A disciplined student, Hardy skipped two years of secondary education and passed her baccalauréat in 1960 aged sixteen. To mark the occasion, her father asked her what gift she would like and she chose a guitar, with which she began to sing her own melodies. Following her mother’s orders, she enrolled in the Paris Institute of Political Studies while still a teenager. Finding it too challenging, she quickly left and joined the Sorbonne to study German. Françoise used the time left from her courses to devote herself to composing songs on her guitar. She began to test her repertoire on the small stage of the Moka Club, where she performed every Thursday. Around this time, she auditioned for record label Pathé-Marconi. Although rejected, she was impressed that she had held the directors’ attention for longer than she expected and felt encouraged after hearing her recorded voice. She then went to Philips Records, where she was recommended to take singing lessons and joined Le Petit Conservatoire de la chanson in 1961, a school for radio performers, led by singer Mireille Hartuch.
In 1961 Françoise signed a record deal with Disque Vogue and they released an extended play record which included her own composition ‘Tous les garçons et les filles’. She was introduced to the French people on the evening of 28 October 1962, when a video clip of her performance of this song was broadcast during an interlude of the televised results of the Presidential Election Referendum. Her career was launched!
On 11 May 1962, Françoise Hardy made her debut as a live performer alongside other young singers at the Disco Revue gala.
The singer’s sudden celebrity status was a source of great discomfort for her, as she claimed in 2011: “I didn’t enjoy at all everything, the trappings, when all of a sudden you become very famous. (…) [Being taken up by fashion houses] was work, things I had to do, a chore—I didn’t enjoy it at all… It is quite impossible to stand—to be admired too much—it is not a normal situation. I don’t like that at all. I am not comfortable with my professional life really, so the word ‘icon’—it’s as though you were talking about someone else, it’s not me really.” She regularly suffered from stage fright, which led to her stopping performing live altogether in 1968. Her public image and style during the 1960s made an impact on international pop culture, something that overshadowed her skills as a singer outside of France. As Hardy’s almost exclusive photographer and agent during the decade, Jean-Marie Périer transformed the singer’s public image from “a shy, gauche-looking schoolgirl” into a “modern young trend-setter.” He persuaded the singer to begin modelling and she soon became “a star of the international fashion world as well as the French music scene.” Nevertheless, she was disenchanted with the lifestyle of the jet-set and high society, and in the 1970s abandoned the image of “fashionable young girl about town” that Périer had created for her.
Françoise found herself at the forefront of the French music scene and became the country’s most exportable female singer. Beginning in 1963, translated re-recordings of “Tous les garçons et les filles” began to be exported to Italian, German and English-speaking markets. The first foreign-language country where the singer found success was Italy, where the song became “Quelli della mia età” and sold 255,000 copies. Also in 1963, between tour dates, she represented Monaco at the Eurovision Song Contest in London, singing “L’amour s’en va”; finishing joint fifth.
Françoise never embarked on a serious career as an actress nor wished to do so. Although reluctant, she accepted several acting roles she was offered in the 1960s. The singer recalled: “I couldn’t see how I could turn down offers by well-known film directors. However, I far preferred music to cinema. Music and chanson allow you to go deep into yourself and how you feel, while cinema is about playing a part, playing a character who might be miles away from who you are.” In 1963, Hardy made her film debut playing the role of Ophelia in Roger Vadim’s Château en Suède.
Her 1965 English-language single “All Over the World” was a substantial hit in the United Kingdom, reaching the Top 20 and staying in the charts for fifteen weeks. It was also successful in South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, probably being her most popular recording among English-speaking audiences. She promoted the song with performances on the British TV shows Ready Steady Go!, Ollie and Fred’s Five O’Clock Club, Thank Your Lucky Stars and Top of the Pops.
Her music became lusher and richer, as she shunned the poor quality of French studios in 1964 to go record in London with arranger Charles Blackwell. She told The Guardian in 2018: “I was happy from that moment. I was free to make another kind of music, not this mechanical music I had been trapped in.”
Pressured by her French and Italian record companies, Hardy took part in the San Remo Music Festival 1966, where she reached the finals with “Parlami di te”.
Following a period of artistic independence, the album Message personnel was released in 1973 on Warner Bros Records and was greeted with commercial and critical success. Its title track was a big commercial success in France that reignited the singer’s career.
The album Entr’acte was released in November 1974 but was a commercial failure. The singer then decided to stay away from music and devote more time to raising her child, releasing only two singles between 1975 and 1976.
In 1977, Star, her first album released under Pathé-Marconi, included six tracks written by Françoise. Star was a commercial success that put the singer back into the media spotlight, introducing her work to a new generation of young people
Her 1978 follow-up Musique saoûle changed Hardy’s musical direction to a more danceable sound with commercial success, aided by the popularity of lead single “J’écoute de la musique saoule“, especially its extended remix version. Fuelled by the popularity of “J’écoute ..” work began on her next album Gin Tonic released in 1980 with an even more commercial approach but only achieving modest success.
Despite reduced sales and mixed reviews, the singer’s respectability remained intact. Hardy’s next album À suivre was released in April 1981 on the Flarenasch label, in breach of her contract with Pathé-Marconi.
The album Quelqu’un qui s’en va was released in the spring of 1981 and Décalages was released on 2 May 1988. Promoted as Hardy’s final album, it was a commercial success and was certified gold for selling a hundred thousand copies.
Hardy resumed her music career in the 1990s, signing a contract with Virgin Records in December 1994. In 1995, she collaborated with English band Blur in the French version of “To the End”, recorded at Abbey Road Studios. It was included as a B-side to their single “Country House”.
In 2005, Hardy received the Female Artist of the Year award for her album Tant de belles choses at the Victoires de la Musique. In 2006, Hardy received the Grande médaille de la chanson française award given by the Académie Française, in recognition of her music career.
Hardy celebrated her 50th anniversary in music In 2012, with the release of her first novel and an album that shared the title L’Amour fou. Diagnosed with laryngeal cancer, the singer declared it her last album but nevertheless returned nearly five years later with the 2018 release of Personne d’autre.
In addition to music, Hardy developed a career as an astrologer, writing extensively on the subject. Françoise first became interested in the mid-1960s and took courses, learned to draw up a birth chart and read many specialized books before being taught traditional astrology for two years. Between recordings of her album Gin Tonic in 1979, Hardy was involved with writing about zodiac signs, provided daily horoscopes and had her own weekly radio show on the RMC radio station. She also had her own programme interviewing celebrities based on their birth charts. A compilation of these interviews was published in 1986. In 1990, Hardy continued her astrological work by writing articles in the Swiss newspaper Le Matin and by hosting a weekly section in Télé Zèbre. On 7 May 2003, Hardy released ‘Les rythmes du zodiaque’, which she conceived as “a book that would allow me to make my little contribution to modern astrology”. The making of the book was a laborious and stressful process that took Hardy over two years to write.
Hardy developed as an author of both fiction and non-fiction. Her autobiography ‘Le désespoir des singes… et autres bagatelles’ was released on 9 October 2008 and became a bestseller in France, selling 250,000 copies. In 2018, the English-language edition of the book was released by Feral House, titled ‘The Despair of Monkeys and Other Trifles’.
In 2012, Hardy published her first novel ‘L’amour fou’ released in conjunction with a musical album of the same title. Hardy began working on its story, which deals with an obsessive romantic relationship, thirty years before its publication. She had shelved the text and had no intention of releasing it, but felt that it was appropriate to publish the book to mark the occasion of her fifty years of music career.
Following the poor sales of albums La pluie sans parapluie and L’Amour fou, Hardy decided to dedicate herself to writing. This resulted in the essay ‘Avis non autorisés’—released in 2015 —in which she expresses the difficulties of reaching her old age. In the book Hardy also shares her views on current affairs, which have been deemed “politically incorrect”. The book was a commercial success and a year later, she published ‘Un cadeau du ciel’, a book in which she reflects on her hospitalization in March 2015 for cancer, during which she nearly died. In the early 2020s, after being unable to continue singing—claiming she had “nothing else to do”—Hardy dedicated herself to the making of the song book ‘Chansons sur toi et nous’—published in 2021- which compiles all of her lyrics and contains commentary on them.
Hardy began her much publicized relationship with fellow singer Jacques Dutronc in 1967. They had a distant relationship and did not live together until the autumn of 1974 after the birth of their only child, Thomas, on 16 June 1973. As an adult, Thomas Dutronc also developed a career as a musician. Hardy and Dutronc got married on 30 March 1981 in a private ceremony. According to Hardy, they formalized their relationship for “financial reasons”, stating in 1989: “I had a little health problem and since I am of a hyper-anxious, hypochondriac temperament… I had gone to see a lawyer to find out what would happen if something happened to me. I have always considered marriage as an uninteresting formality.” Their relationship become troubled, compounded by infidelities on both sides and Dutronc’s alcoholism, and the couple separated in late 1988. They never divorced and their relationship evolved into that of a “special friendship”.
Between late 2004 and early 2005, Hardy was diagnosed with MALT lymphoma, which began a “hellish period” that disrupted her life. She then underwent chemotherapy treatment that was initially successful. In March 2015, her condition worsened and she had to be admitted to hospital, where she was put into an artificial coma and nearly died. During her hospitalization, she also broke her hip and elbow. That month, she told Le Figaro: “I am very isolated, very handicapped by illness. I was diagnosed with lymphoma over ten years ago. But it is especially in the last three years that my symptoms have worsened. I also have a lot of difficulty walking. […] There are times when I absolutely cannot see anyone and I cannot go out. But I remain positive, I live from day to day, I have no choice, I avoid thinking about it, it does not obsess me.” She then underwent further chemotherapy and immunotherapy sessions.
Hardy’s health worsened and in 2021 she made news as an advocate for the legalization of physician-assisted suicide in France, expressing her desire to have recourse to euthanasia. “It’s absolutely appalling, but for the moment I’m reassured. I manage to cook for myself. As long as I can do that, okay! But if it does become even worse, if I am weakened to the point of not being able to do anything, I would seriously think about euthanasia. I cannot stay like this waiting for death to come, because I cannot live any more. I can’t do the things that my life requires.” She also disclosed her inability to continue singing as a result of the effects of the treatments.
Françoise Hardy died of laryngeal cancer in Paris, on 11 June 2024, at the age of 80. Prior to her death, she had also experienced several falls and bone fractures.
On 20 June 2024, the farewell ceremony for Françoise Hardy took place at Père Lachaise Cemetery.
