French singer, actress and model Françoise Hardy dies at the age of 80

Photo: Tony Evans/Getty Images

French singer-songwriter, actress and model Françoise Hardy has died aged 80. She rose to fame in the 1960s when she coined the yé-yé movement (a style of pop music that takes its name from the French term for “yeah yeah”) and established her own sound in a discography spanning decades. Hardy’s son, fellow musician Thomas Dutronc, confirmed the news of her death on social media, sharing a baby photo of himself with her and captioning it “Maman est partie” – mummy is gone – followed by a series of hearts.

Hardy was born in Paris in 1944 and signed a record label contract as a teenager. Known for hits such as “Tous les garçons et les filles” and the English-language “It Hurts to Say Goodbye”, Hardy distinguished herself from her Yé-Yé colleagues through the melancholic quality of her music. She had many famous fans – according to The guardDavid Bowie once admitted he was “passionately in love with her,” Bob Dylan wrote love poems about her, and Mick Jagger called her his “ideal woman.” You may also know Hardy from roles in films such as John Frankenheimer’s Grand Prixacting was not her true passion. In 2018, she told the New York Just that her younger self was “naive” and didn’t know how to turn down offers from famous directors. “I liked music much more than cinema,” she mused.

Hardy learned she had lymphoma in 2004. She was put into an induced coma in 2016 and doctors didn’t expect her to ever wake up. But just two years later, she was back in the spotlight, doing press for an autobiography and a new album. Other people“What a person sings is an expression of who he is,” she told the British observer at the time of the project’s release. “Fortunately, the most beautiful songs are not happy songs. The songs that stay in our memory are the sad, romantic songs.”