Charles Aznavour, the beloved singer, songwriter and actor who was often described as the French Frank Sinatra, has died in his home in southeastern France, his spokeswoman said Monday. He was 94.
Aznavour, who was born Shahnour Varinag Aznavourian in Paris to Armenian parents, sold more than 180 million records in 80 countries. Follow the reactions to his death on our liveblog below.
Date created : 2018-10-01
The French singer Charles Aznavour – often hailed as his country’s Frank Sinatra – has died at the age of 94.
Aznavour, who was born Shahnour Varinag Aznavourian in Paris to Armenian parents, sold more than 100m records in 80 countries and had about 1,400 songs to his name, including 1,300 he wrote himself. He was sometimes described as the French Sinatra because of his stirring, melancholic style.
He left school aged nine to become a child actor and went on to have a successful parallel acting career, most notably appearing in François Truffaut’s new-wave classic Tirez Sur le Pianiste (Shoot the Piano Player), Claude Chabrol’s Les Fantômes du Chapelier (The Hatter’s Ghost), and the 1979 Oscar-winning film adaptation of Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Charles Aznavour with Nicole Berger in Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player. Photograph: Allstar/Astor Pictures
His singing career was forged in occupied Paris during the second world war, performing in cabarets as his parents secretly worked with the resistance, hiding Jews, communists and others in their apartment. “French is my working language but my family language is always Armenian,” he said in 2017.
Aznavour opened for Édith Piaf at the Moulin Rouge and the popular singer was an early adviser – and flatmate. “I brought her my youth, my madness; she loved my whole jazzy side,” he told the Guardian in 2015. She advised him to have a nose job, only to declare, “I preferred you before” after the surgery.
He is one of the most celebrated exponents of the French “chanson” form – easy-listening songs with vivid lyrics, rich in storytelling, emotion and humour. One early song, 1955’s Après l’Amour, was banned on French radio for its depiction of a couple basking in post-coital happiness. 1972’s What Makes a Man, meanwhile, is sung in the persona of a gay man who faces down homophobia to declare: “Nobody has the right to be / The judge of what is right for me.” He became perhaps best known for his gloomier numbers – the director Jean Cocteau once quipped: “Before Aznavour, despair was unpopular.”
His biggest hit in English was She, a 1974 romantic ballad in which Aznavour confronts the equal joy and strife in a relationship, nevertheless declaring “the meaning of my life is she”. It spent four weeks at No 1 in the UK singles chart, and was also recorded in French, German, Italian and Spanish. The song got a second lease of life when it was covered by Elvis Costello for the soundtrack to the 1999 film Notting Hill, reaching No 19 in the UK. Aznavour’s only other solo hit in the UK was with The Old Fashioned Way, which reached the top 40 in 1973.
Over the years he recorded duets with the likes of Sinatra, Elton John, Céline Dion, Bryan Ferry and Sting, as well as the classical tenors Luciano Pavarotti and Plácido Domingo. In 2010, he recorded Un Geste pour Haiti Chérie, a song with young French rap stars, to help raise money after that year’s devastating earthquake in Haiti.
Another singing partner was Liza Minnelli, with whom he also had a brief love affair, telling the Telegraph in 2014: “She learned from me. She says that herself – or else I would have shut my mouth!”
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The French president, Emmanuel Macron, tweeted: “Charles Aznavour was profoundly French, deeply attached to his Armenian roots and known throughout the world. He has accompanied the joys and pain of three generations. His masterpieces, the tone of his voice, his unique radiance will long survive him.”
In a second tweet, Macron said he had invited Aznavour to sing at the Francophonie Summit, on 11-12 October in the Armenian capital, Yerevan.
“We share with the Armenian people the mourning of the French people,” the president added.
Renaud Muselier, the president of the Provence region of south-east France where Aznavour was living at the time he died, said: “French culture has lost one if its greatest. He has left us a priceless body of work rich with more than 1,200 songs. A generous and charismatic singer, he leaves an immense emptiness.”
France TV described him as the “last giant of French song” and said his death had left it “orphaned by its doyen and most illustrious ambassador”.
The former French president François Hollande tweeted: “Charles Aznavour has just said adieu, but for us he will always be on stage.”
Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, tweeted that Aznavour was “A Parisien who became a true icon of French song and a passionate ambassador for Armenia around the world.”
At the unveiling of Aznavour’s star on the Hollywood walk of fame in 2017, director Peter Bogdanovich said: “Sinatra once said every song is a one-act play with one character and Charles is an extraordinary actor as well as an extraordinary singer.”
Aznavour’s last interview was broadcast on French television on Friday evening. In it he said he “would die” if he could no longer work.
“Me, I cannot not live and I live on stage. I’m happy on stage and that’s obvious,” he said. He added: “My sister and I decided we’re going to pass 100 years. It’s on record. She doesn’t have the right to go back on it and neither do I.”
The singer, songwriter and actor Charles Aznavour, who has died aged 94, was one of France’s best-loved entertainers and its most potent show-business export since Maurice Chevalier. Edith Piaf was one of those who encouraged his early career, and in many ways Aznavour could be seen as the male Piaf; his slight frame disguised a similarly huge talent. He was as important a composer and songwriter as he was a singer – and he could be a great actor even without singing a note on screen.
There were times in Aznavour’s career when he was as popular outside France as he was in his own country. His recording of She, a sweet, soulful number composed by Aznavour and Herbert Kretzmer, topped the British charts for several weeks in 1974. Aznavour’s songs were in the great dramatic tradition of the chanson, storytelling to music, rather than mere verse sung in the way of the conventional pop song. Even when he performed in English, his songs sounded as though they had first been minted in Montmartre. He was often called the French Frank Sinatra and the comparison was apt. When he sang The Old Fashioned Way or Yesterday When I Was Young, listeners somehow caught his nostalgia kick and remembered those days, too.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Charles Aznavour’s recording of She topped the British charts in 1974.
In films, he was a character actor who was always the most interesting figure on the screen. His lead role as a musician clashing with criminals in François Truffaut’s 1960 drama Tirez sur le Pianiste (Shoot the Piano Player) established him internationally.
Aznavour, however, was always self-deprecating. He would refer people to a crumpled piece of paper on which, as a very young man, he had written his weaknesses. They were, he said: “My voice, my height, my gestures, my lack of culture and education, my frankness and my lack of personality.”
No one doubted his frankness, but his personality was one of his greatest characteristics, and he seemed to personify French culture to the English-speaking world. His height (5ft 3in) was the only thing that he could do nothing about, but it was one of those great trademarks that help to mark out a show-business personality – that and his gravelly voice, and the facial features that got craggier as he got older. Aznavour recalled: “They used to say, ‘When you are as ugly as that and when you have a voice like that, you do not sing.’ But Piaf used to tell me, ‘You will be the greatest.’”
Aznavour’s family were Armenian and went to France in the wake of the Turkish massacres of their people. His parents, Mischa and Knar Aznavourian, were living in Paris at the time of their son’s birth, in a poor part of the Latin quarter, where his father worked as a cook and his mother as a seamstress. His father was also a part-time singer and his mother a sometime actor, but neither made a living at what they wanted to do most.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Charles Aznavour in a scene from the movie Paris Music Hall in 1957. Photograph: Ullstein Bild/Getty Images
Encouraged by them, he danced, played the violin, sang and aspired to act. He got work as a film extra from the 1930s onwards and in 1941 joined the Jean Dasté dramatic troupe. During the second world war, having adopted Charles Aznavour as his stage name, he joined the singer-composer Pierre Roche in a nightclub act and gained experience writing lyrics and in cabaret. In the postwar years they went on tour with Piaf around France and in the US, but split up when Roche married.
Aznavour wrote songs for artists including Piaf, Gilbert Bécaud and Juliette Gréco, and in the 1950s began to have some success in his own right, first in France and then internationally. By the early 1960s he was able to sell out Carnegie Hall in New York. He appeared in films such as Les Dragueurs (Young Have No Morals, 1959) and La Tête Contre les Murs (The Keepers, 1959). By the time he made Le Testament d’Orphée (Testament of Orpheus, 1960), he was enough of a star to be featured in a cameo role as himself. After his acclaimed performance in Shoot the Piano Player, he starred in US and British films including Candy (1968) and And Then There Were None (1974), an Agatha Christie adaptation, and in the Oscar-winning German drama The Tin Drum (1979).
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Liza Minnelli welcoming Charles Aznavour on to the stage at the end of her show at the Lido cabaret in Paris, 1987. Photograph: Laurent Rebours/AP
In 2002 he appeared in Atom Egoyan’s drama about the Armenian genocide, Ararat. Aznavour retained close ties to his family’s homeland. When an earthquake hit Armenia in 1988, killing more than 20,000 people, he formed the charity Aznavour for Armenia and wrote Pour Toi Arménie, which he recorded with a lineup of well-known French singers, to help support those affected by the disaster. In 2004 he was made a National Hero of Armenia, and a few years later an Aznavour museum was opened in the capital, Yerevan. He was appointed Armenia’s ambassador to Unesco and in 2009 Armenian ambassador to Switzerland.
Across his eight-decade career, he wrote more than 1,000 songs and was said to have sold more than 180m records. He continued to record popular albums, including Duos (2008), a collection of duets with, among others, Elton John, Carole King, Liza Minnelli and Plácido Domingo. In 2011 he held a month-long residency at the Olympia music hall in Paris.
Aznavour was married three times and had six children. “I know my life is a flop,” he said once. “A flop as a father, a flop as a man. You must make a choice: a successful life as a man, or show business. Now it is too late even to make a choice. I belong to the public or to my pride. My only salvation is to become a greater artist.” A legion would say he achieved that salvation.
He is survived by his third wife, Ulla (nee Thorsel), whom he married in 1967, and their children Katia, Mischa and Nicolas; and by Seda and Charles, the children of his first marriage, to Micheline Rugel. A son, Patrick, from his second marriage, to Evelyne Plessis, predeceased him.
• Charles Aznavour (Shahnour Varenagh Aznavourian), singer, songwriter and actor, born 22 May 1924; died 1 October 2018
Image copyright AFP / Getty Images
"I don't express myself particularly well when I talk, but when I write, words, melodies flow," Charles Aznavour told The Telegraph in 2001.
"Their pathway is from brain to pen."
Over the years, he wrote more than 1,200 songs, dealing with everything from street violence and the deaf to ecology and homosexuality (and love, bien sûr).
It's almost impossible to write a precise guide to such an extensive catalogue - but here are just six of his most memorable songs.
Yesterday, When I Was Young (Hier Encore)
Aznavour was only 40 when he wrote this nostalgic torch song to youth; a chanson that devastatingly captures the realisation of wasted potential.
In French it was called Hier Encore but Aznavour always felt the English version, co-written with Les Miserables' lyricist Herbert Kretzmer, was more poetic.
It opens optimistically: "Yesterday when I was young / The taste of life was sweet as rain upon my tongue," but grows more poignant as it builds to the finale: "There are so many songs in me that won't be sung ... The time has come for me to pay for yesterday / When I was young."
The song was made a hit in the US by country singer Roy Clark; while Bing Crosby, Andy Williams, Shirley Bassey and Dusty Springfield all recorded covers.
But the world-weary resignation of Aznavour's original, accentuated by that trademark vocal rasp (caused by a paralyzed vocal cord in his youth), was never bettered.
What Makes A Man (Comme Ils Disent)
Controversial at the time, this ballad paints a tender portrait of a lonely gay man in the 1970s, of his close relationship to his mother, and his nights spent impersonating female stars in Parisian nightclubs.
Aznavour wrote it to address "the specific problems my gay friends faced," he once said.
"I could see things were different for them, that they were marginalised."
"It is still forbidden in certain unenlightened countries," he told Canada's The Star in 2014. "I sang it in prime time in America on the Johnny Carson show 25 years ago. They were not happy about that, but I received many grateful letters."
Après l'Amour
"You slip your fingers into my open shirt" - Après l'Amour is a flighty, languorous depiction of a couple lying together in bed after making love.
"Wrapped in the twisted sheets, we stay entwined together," he sings.
Included on the 1955 EP Interdit Aux Moins de 16 Ans (forbidden to those under 16), it was struck from the airwaves by the French government.
But once the ban was lifted in the late 1960s, it became one of his most-loved songs.
She (Tous Les Visages De L'amour)
His biggest hit in the UK, She was written as the theme tune to the 1974 BBC series The Seven Faces of Women.
The song needed to tie together the series' seven separate stories, each depicting contemporary women at various stages of life - which is why the woman Aznavour sings about is never named.
The producers originally wanted Marlene Dietrich to record the song but lyricist Herbert Kretzmer (Les Misarables) put his foot down, insisting "if there is one thing I know about the mystery of women it's that they don't talk about it. If they did, it wouldn't be a mystery."
Aznavour spent four weeks at number one with the record; but it took longer to become a hit in his home country, partly because the word "she" sounded like a slang word for faeces.
You've Let Yourself Go (Tu T'Laisses Aller)
"I gaze at you in sheer despair and see your mother standing there," sings the three-times-married Aznavour, as he notes with displeasure as his partner grows old and dowdy.
Rather than telling a real-life story, though, You've Let Yourself Go was inspired by a movie - La Poison - a dark satire in which a husband gets away with murdering his charmless, alcoholic wife, despite admitting his guilt in court.
"There's plenty of great ideas in movies. Plenty of bad ones too," said Aznavour. "A good writer knows the difference."
La Boheme
Aznavour's signature song, La Boheme remembers Toulouse-Lautrec's Montmartre, where painters could rarely afford to eat - but where art and love were enough to sustain them.
An ode to simpler times "when I was starving and you posed nude," it is also a lament for the loss of youth.
"When, on a random day, I go for a walk to my old address," sings Aznavour, "Montmartre seems sad and the lilac trees are dead."
Such was the song's popularity that he recorded versions in Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, English and German.
He also performed it at almost all his concerts, frequently producing a handkerchief and using it as a painter's rag, dabbing at an invisible canvas as he sang. When he dropped the hankie to the floor, there was inevitably a scramble amongst the audience to retrieve it.
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