Aspiring Kiwi actor became a French folk legend
Graeme Allwright, who has died aged 93, was an aspiring New Zealand actor who migrated to France in 1951 and rose to fame there as a singer and songwriter of folk ballads in the mid-1960s.
Born in Wellington, Allwright spent his early childhood in Hawera and Whanganui before returning to Wellington, where his father Syd became stationmaster of Wellington railway station.
Both Syd and wife Doris were accomplished singers and were well known in musical and repertory circles in the late 1930s, in which they involved Graeme and his elder brother Peter from an early age. The family formed a singing group, the Melody Four, which performed in hospitals and for private events, and once a week on Radio 2YA.
Graeme attended Wellington College, where his final year, 1944, was saddened by Peter’s death on active service with Bomber Command in Italy. By then he had become an aspiring actor, and from 1945 to 1948 took part in productions for the Wellington Repertory Theatre Company, the Religious Drama Society and the Light Opera Company alongside the likes of Peter Harcourt, Selwyn Toogood and Dick Campion.
He gradually progressed to major roles, leading to hopes for a professional acting career abroad, and in 1948 he obtained entry to the Old Vic Theatre School in London, assisted by a small government grant obtained in part through the help of Prime Minister Peter Fraser, after Allwright’s emerging talent had come to his attention.
At the Old Vic school he acted in several student productions with sufficient merit to impress both Dame Edith Evans and Anthony Quayle, who in 1951 invited Allwright to join the company of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-on-Avon. But Graeme had met and fallen in love with a young French student at the school, Catherine Daste, and instead followed her to France, where they married in December 1951.
Catherine was the granddaughter of Jean Copeau, the great renewer of French acting methods and set design in the early 20th century, and the daughter of Jean Daste, a theatre director whose company the young couple then joined.
But Allwright’s lack of French limited him to back-stage work until 1956, when he was fluent enough to take on acting roles. In the meantime, and subsequently in between these, he took on a jobs in country areas including beekeeping, bricklaying, plastering, then as an orderly in a psychiatric hospital.
In France, he taught himself to play the guitar, and in the 1960s began adapting into French some of the newly emerging folk anthems of the American civil rights and war protest movements. Encouraged by friends, he obtained gigs at Left Bank cabarets in Paris, and in 1965 as a supporting act for the French pop singer Barbara. There his talent was spotted by a Philips executive who commissioned a first album, which appeared in 1966 under the title Le Trimardeur (The Tramp).
Two other albums followed, in which Allwright combined transpositions into French of songs by Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Tom Paxton and Peter, Paul and Mary as well as Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne, with his own compositions with French lyrics. His songs of social and political protest, their unique AmericanoFrench rhythms and the slightly melancholic air infusing them struck a chord with a French youth audience.
His repertoire became the sound of the 1968 student protest movement in Paris, and Allwright was amazed to find the audience singing along to his lyrics on concert tours throughout France.
In the 1970s he began to tour through Europe and North America, and to French-speaking countries in Africa as well as to India and Southeast Asia. At the same time he was translating songs of
French poet-singers such as Georges Brassens for English-speaking audiences.
In 1976 he met and became friends with Leonard Cohen, who invited him to transpose more of his songs to French, which Allwright did with notable success with numbers such as The Stranger Song and Sisters of Mercy.
In the 1980s, Allwright returned to the French stage, taking the principal role in a play by Moliere that also toured to Africa. Until his final retirement in 2017, he continued singing and theatre tours, as well as recording more than 20 albums.
Inspired in part by frequent stays in an ashram in Pondicherry, India, Allwright became committed to the search for peace and justice throughout the world. He rewrote, together with collaborator Sylvie Dion, more pacific words for the French national anthem, La Marseillaise, which they recommended to French President Nicolas Sarkozy. The anthem was sung by Allwright in Wellington in front of Gandhi’s statue on October 2, 2009, for the World March for Peace and Non-Violence.
Aside from this visit, Allwright returned privately to New Zealand twice before undertaking a concert tour in 2005-06. This tour was filmed by a French film crew and broadcast in France under the title Pacific Blues. He also has a street named after him in Le Quesnoy, the French village liberated by New Zealand troops in November 1918.
Although he became a French citizen, Allwright remained a passionate Kiwi. He supported the anti-apartheid and antinuclear movements here, being especially appalled about the Rainbow Warrior affair.
When asked in 2004 about his dual identity, he replied: ‘‘It’s true that I love France. Nevertheless, my roots are in New Zealand. There is no doubt about it.’’
Graeme Allwright is survived by first wife Catherine Daste, their children Nicolas, Christophe and Jacques, and by second wife Claire Bataille, and their daughter Jeanne. – By Colin Anderson