Charles Aznavour
Diminutive French singer, songwriter and actor who sold over 100m records, including She, and appeared in 80 films
CHARLES Aznavour, who has died aged 94, was for more than 60 years one of France’s best known chanteurs; his bittersweet love songs, crooned in a wistful, sadeyed, throaty croak, became an institution, not only in his homeland but also throughout the world, where he ranks alongside Charles Trenet and Edith Piaf as one of the great French troubadours of the 20th Century.
During the course of his career, Aznavour composed perhaps 1,000 songs, and sold well over 100m records. But he was also an actor, appearing in some 80 films, notably as the title character of Francois Truffaut’s Tirez sur le pianiste (Shoot the Piano Player, 1960), in which he played a cafe-bar entertainer caught up in the criminal underworld.
It was, however, as a singer and songwriter that Aznavour was best known, although he had been performing in seedy nightclubs and bars across the world for at least a decade before he had his first taste of real fame.
Initially, it seemed, audiences were reluctant to accept this diminutive figure, with his husky renditions of songs that seemed to defy the conventions of sentimental pop music.
The lyrics were personal, combined irony with melancholy innocence and were occasionally risque. I Hate Sunday, which Aznavour wrote for the chanteuse Edith Piaf, was banned from French radio for several years.
But in 1956, after topping the bill in Casablanca, Aznavour landed a contract at the Cinema Alhambra in Paris, followed by a spell headlining at the Olympia, also in the city. With songs such as Sur Ma Vie, Parce que and the controversial Apres L’Amour, his popularity soared and soon his records were selling all over the world.
Throughout the 1960s, Aznavour toured the world playing venues such as Carnegie Hall in New York and travelling as far afield as Lebanon, Africa and Russia. He also played in Erevan, Armenia, performing La Mamma, which became one of the standards in his repertoire.
Although Aznavour’s songs were melodic, their power was in the lyrics, and he was at pains to separate himself from crooners such as Frank Sinatra and Mel Torme, describing himself as “a writer who sings his own songs”.
Many of his songs were based on his own experiences, or sounded as if they were — as with Reste (Stay), in which a man pleads with his mistress not to leave or J’ai bu, about someone who has lost his lover because of his drinking.
Aznavour’s music had a renaissance among British listeners in 1999, after Elvis Costello covered She — originally a UK No 1 hit in 1974 — for the Richard Curtis film Notting Hill. The song, which opened the film over a montage of shots of Julia Roberts’s gleaming smile, was typical Aznavour:
She may be the face I can’t forget / A trace of pleasure or regret / May be the treasure or the price I have to pay / She may be the song that summer sings / May be the chill that autumn brings / May be a hundred tearful things / Within the measure of the day.
The film-makers had originally used Aznavour’s recording of the song, but Costello had been called in to record a version that they thought would be more appealing to an American market. For Aznavour it reaffirmed the limits of his marketability. “My shortcomings,” he said, “are my voice, my height, my gestures, my lack of education, my frankness and my lack of personality.”
Charles Aznavour was born Shahnourh Varenagh Aznaourian on May 22, 1924 in the Latin Quarter of Paris. His parents were Armenian immigrants en route to America and awaiting a visa when their second son (named “Charles” by a nurse who could not pronounce his real name) was born.
The family decided to settle in Paris where his father, Misha, opened a restaurant. But both his parents came originally from theatrical backgrounds, and they continued to perform in Armenian plays and musicals in Paris.
Charles was only three when he made his theatrical debut having wandered on stage at the start of a play.
Even as a child Aznavour’s voice had what he described as “a little frog”, but this did little to hamper his ambition. At the age of nine, having heard Maurice Chevalier sing Donnez-moi la main mam’zelle et ne dites rien ,he announced that he wanted to be a chansonnier. That year, 1933, he appeared in a play, Un bon petit diable, in Paris and in the film La Guerre des Gosses, and subsequently combined touring the provinces as a “boy actor” with attending acting classes at L’Ecole des enfants du spectacle in Paris.
He left school in 1939 and started working as a nightclub dancer while continuing to tour with theatrical troupes. His exploits as a young actor and dancer formed the basis for his later song Mes emmerdes (My Troubles ), a bawdy recollection of “the jokes, the farts, the madness, the orgies”. But it was not until 1944, when he met the young songwriter Pierre Roche, that Aznavour began to achieve any recognition.
For the next eight years, they wrote and performed together. Initially Aznavour had little confidence in his throaty singing voice, but he was encouraged by Edith Piaf, who began to include some of his songs in her repertoire.
In 1952, after touring America and Canada with Roche, Aznavour returned to France on his own, and embarked on a solo career. Initially he achieved little success as a singer, but he survived by writing songs for both Piaf and Juliette Greco.
In the late 1950s, his film career took off. Having starred in Jean-Pierre Mocky’s 1959 film Les dragueurs, he then appeared in Georges Franju’s drama La Tete contre les murs (Head Against the Wall), followed by Tirez sur le pianiste, Truffaut’s French take on American crime melodrama, in which Aznavour was understated, enigmatic and broody as the former concert pianist who finds himself on the run from some gangsters.
Throughout the 1960s, he continued to alternate concerts in France with world tours. At one stage, his hectic schedule included three performances a day at the Paris Olympia.
As well as She , he had a British Top 40 hit with The Old Fashioned Way in 1973, and of his French hits, his favourite was La Boheme, which reached No 1 in his home country in 1965.
Following a move to America in the early 1970s, his lyrics began to take on a more political tone, with songs such as Le temps des loups (about urban violence) and Comme ils disent, which deals with homosexuality in a sympathetic way.
He relished controversy. “I am incorrigible,” he explained, “I say merde to anybody, however important he is, when I feel like it.”
He dismissed attempts to ban some of his songs in the 1950s, saying: “They didn’t want to hear my forbidden words. Nothing is dirty, everything is poetic — but moral hypocrites never admit this.”
But in 1988 Aznavour, who was still performing to packed auditoriums, took on a new mantle when an earthquake in Armenia killed 50,000 people. He founded Aznavour pour L’Armenie, a fundraising body (later a foundation), and enlisted the help of French singers and actors in the recording of a song, Pour Toi Armenie.
He continued to tour into his 90s, and won numerous awards. In 1997, he was appointed Officier of the Legion d’honneur, advanced to Commandeur in 2004.
Health scares (and a car accident) put his touring career temporarily on hold, but each farewell concert was followed by a comeback. “I can relax eternally when I’m dead,” he said. “Life has to be lived.”
Interviewed by Celia Walden in The Telegraph earlier this year, Aznavour insisted that he would be performing on his 100th birthday. Asked whether it would be his last concert, he said: “No. I will do a concert on that date — and after that we’ll see... why would I stop? In order to die at home sitting in my armchair? Absolutely not.”
Charles Aznavour. who died last Monday, is survived by his third wife Ulla, their two sons and a daughter, and two children from an earlier marriage. A son predeceased him. © Telegraph