French National Treasure Françoise Hardy Dead at 80

Photo: Tony Evans/Getty Images

French singer-songwriter, actress, and model Françoise Hardy has died at 80. She rose to fame in the 1960s while making her mark on the yé-yé movement (a style of pop music that gets its name from the French term for “yeah yeah”), and went on to establish her sound as an artist through a decades-spanning discography. Hardy’s son, fellow musician Thomas Dutronc, confirmed the news of her death on social media. He shared a baby photo of himself with her, captioning it, “Maman est partie” — Mom is gone — followed by a series of hearts.

Born in 1944 in Paris, Hardy signed a contract with a record label as a teenager. Known for hits like “Tous les garçons et les filles” and the English-language “It Hurts to Say Goodbye,” Hardy would distinguish herself from her yé-yé peers through a melancholic quality to her music. She had many famous fans — per The Guardian, David 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.” While you might also recognize Hardy from roles in films including John Frankenheimer’s Grand Prix, acting was not her true passion. In 2018, she told the New York Times that her younger self was “naïve” and didn’t see how she could turn down offers from well-known directors. “I far preferred music to cinema,” she reflected.

In 2004, Hardy found out she had lymphatic cancer. She was placed in an induced coma in 2016, and doctors did not expect her to ever wake up. Yet just two years later, she was back in the public eye doing press for an autobiography and a new album, Personne d’Autre. “What a person sings is an expression of what they are,” she told Britain’s Observer at the time of the project’s release. “Luckily for me, the most beautiful songs are not happy songs. The songs we remember are the sad, romantic songs.”