Françoise Hardy, a French singer, actor and model whose classical beauty and often melancholy music combined to transfix fans internationally in the 1960s and beyond, has died at age 80.
Her son, Thomas Dutronc, also a musician, reported the death on his Instagram account, posting a baby photo of himself with his mother and writing: “Maman est partie.” Or, mom is gone.
Hardy had battled lymphatic and laryngeal cancer over the last two decades, since first being diagnosed with the former condition in 2004.
In a sign of her ongoing legend, in 2023, Rolling Stone magazine ranked Hardy as No. 162 on a ranking of the greatest singers of all time. She was the only French performer on the list. Will Hermes wrote that Hardy “epitomizedFrench cool and Gallic heat simultaneously, with a breathy, deadpan alto that wafted like Gauloises smoke. Her words enhanced her tone: Writing her own material, unusual in the early mid-Sixties, especially for women, she also recorded work by masters like Serge Gainsbourg, and her take on Leonard Cohen’s ‘Suzanne’ may be the most evocative ever recorded, his included.” Hermes wrote that her dozens of album releases “still make existentialism sound impossibly elegant.”
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