Françoise Hardy, French singer-songwriter and fashion icon, dies at 80 (2024)

Ms. Hardy was a little-known 18-year-old singer from Paris when she appeared on French television in October 1962, performing her sentimental pop song “Tous les garçons et les filles” (“All the Boys and Girls”) as the country waited to hear the results of a presidential election referendum.

Gazing into the camera, she sang in French of watching happy couples who “walk in love without fear of tomorrow. Yes but me, I’m alone in the streets with a tormented soul. Yes but me, I’m alone because nobody loves me.”

By the end of the year, she had sold more than half a million records, acquiring a devoted following with her rich alto and wistful lyrics. Singing in French, English, Italian and German, she became closely identified with the European rock style known as yé-yé, although music critics said her songs were often more sophisticated than those of contemporaries such as France Gall and Sylvie Vartan.

Ms. Hardy incorporated elements of country, folk, bossa nova, jazz and baroque pop into her music, writing many of her own hits while also working with songwriters such as Serge Gainsbourg, who helped her adapt “It Hurts to Say Goodbye” into a hit French single. Her ballad “All Over the World” climbed the British pop charts, and her love song “Le temps de l’amour” — driven by a marching drum beat and slinky electric guitar riff — reached a new audience after Wes Anderson used it in his 2012 movie “Moonrise Kingdom.”

“With tender, nostalgic air and a voice heard as if through a veil, Françoise manages to attract both kids and their parents, men and women alike,” the French magazine Special Pop declared in 1967. “More than a singer, she’s becoming a universal myth with whom thousands of young girls dream of identifying.”

With her high cheekbones and light brown hair that fell around her shoulders, Ms. Hardy drew admirers including Mick Jagger, who described her as his ideal woman (she suspected she “was too clean” for him, given his drug use); Bowie, who said he had been “very passionately in love” with her from a distance; and Dylan, who wrote a poem “for françoise hardy” in the liner notes of his fourth album.

When Dylan performed in Paris for the first time, at the Olympia in 1966, Ms. Hardy was sitting in the front row. As she told it, he refused to go back onstage after the intermission unless she visited him in the dressing room. “It was surreal, but I went,” she recalled in a 2005 interview with Britain’s Independent newspaper. “He looked very thin and sickly, which may explain why the concert was so bad.”

For years, Ms. Hardy was admired for her bold fashion sense, with the Associated Press calling her “the symbol of swinging youth in France.” Appearing on the cover of magazines such as Paris Match and Vogue, she was photographed in flared pants and short skirts, leather jackets and knee-length fur coats, boyish newsboy caps and derby hats.

She developed a close relationship with couturier Paco Rabanne, who designed a shimmering gold-plated minidress for her, and was also known for wearing a futuristic all-white suit by André Courrèges and a swaggering tuxedo suit designed by Yves Saint Laurent.

Interviewed by Vogue, French couturier Nicolas Ghesquière declared that Ms. Hardy was “the very essence of French style.” Her first hit single even inspired the name of Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo’s Paris-based label, Comme des Garçons.

Ms. Hardy often downplayed her beauty in interviews, and later said that she battled shyness and insecurity after years in which her grandmother repeatedly told her she was unattractive. (“If it weren’t for the way I dress,” Ms. Hardy said in 1968, “no one would notice me.”) She had little interest in an acting career, although she appeared poised for movie stardom after director Roger Vadim — who married Brigitte Bardot and launched her to fame — cast her in a 1963 comedy called “Nutty, Naughty Chateau.”

“I was very naive and a well-brought up young woman,” Ms. Hardy told the New York Times in 2018. “I couldn’t see how I could turn down offers by well-known film directors,” including John Frankenheimer, who cast her in the 1966 racing drama “Grand Prix” after seeing her walk down a street in London. “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.”

Ms. Hardy stopped performing at concerts in 1968, focusing instead on recording albums such as “La question” (1971), a collaboration with the Brazilian guitarist Tuca that drew some of the best reviews of her career.

She later immersed herself in astrology, writing books and hosting a daily radio show on the subject, and collaborated with musicians including Iggy Pop, the “Godfather of Punk,” with whom she recorded the jazz standard “I’ll Be Seeing You.”

“It has always been a big surprise to me that people, even very good musicians, were moved by my voice,” she told the Observer newspaper in 2018. “I know its limitations, I always have. 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.”

The older of two daughters, Françoise Madeleine Hardy was born in Nazi-occupied Paris on Jan. 17, 1944.

Her mother was a bookkeeper’s assistant who “lived the life of a nun,” Ms. Hardy said; her father was an older, wealthier married man who managed an adding-machine company. They ended their affair when Ms. Hardy was a child, and she was raised by her mother in the Ninth Arrondissem*nt, where her neighbors included future rock star Johnny Hallyday.

Ms. Hardy studied at a convent school and listened obsessively to Radio Luxembourg, which broadcast transatlantic pop and rock-and-roll by musicians including Elvis Presley, Brenda Lee, Cliff Richard and Billy Fury. When her father offered to buy her a gift as a reward for acing her high school exams, she selected a guitar. Soon, she was writing three or four songs a week.

“I was astonished to find that I could make so much from just three chords,” she told the Observer. “Really, those three chords produced most of my songs for the next 10 years.”

Ms. Hardy began auditioning for record labels and in 1961 landed a contract with Disques Vogues, which released her self-titled debut album the next year. AllMusic reviewer Stewart Mason described it as “the ’60s pop equivalent of Shaker furniture: free of ornamentation and exquisitely simple.”

Yet Ms. Hardy was largely disappointed with the record, and astonished by the glowing reaction to its most popular song. “‘Tous les garçons’? Tiny voice, trite little melody, inconsequential song,” she told the Daily Telegraph in 2005. “Of course, I am pleased with what it did for me, but I am not remotely proud of it.”

Taking the advice of French singer Richard Anthony, she worked for several years in England, where she said she was able to find better session musicians — including guitarist Jimmy Page — and could exercise more control over her music.

In 1981 she married her longtime partner, actor and singer Jacques Dutronc. They had a son, Thomas, and later separated, though they never divorced. Information on survivors was not immediately available.

Ms. Hardy released her last studio album, “Personne d’autre” (“No One Else”), in 2018, two years after being hospitalized for a coma. Her health had declined, and doctors thought she would never wake up. But she managed to return to the recording studio to reflect on her mortality in songs such as “Train spécial,” about taking a one-way trip out of the world.

That same year, she published an English translation of her memoir, “The Despair of Monkeys and Other Trifles,” in which she wrote about her mother’s painful nerve disease and decision to die by euthanasia; her sister’s paranoid schizophrenia; and her father’s murder by a younger male lover. The book’s title referenced the monkey puzzle tree, which has pointed, scalelike leaves that reminded her of “men who have caused me despair.”

In a 2021 interview with the magazine Femme Actuelle, Ms. Hardy argued in favor of assisted suicide, which is illegal in France, as a way to avoid additional pain following her years of radiation and immunotherapy treatments. But she also sounded at peace.

“Life is an initiatory school where we learn through mistakes and trials that try to make us better understand what we had not understood until then,” she said. “The moments when I behaved badly were due to obliviousness, ignorance, selfishness … Remembering the happy moments with Jacques and Thomas does me a lot of good. I long for it.”