Juliette Gréco Singer
THE SINGER Juliette Gréco, who has died at 93, was the epitome of post- war French entertainment, the muse of Saint- Germain- desPrés, friend to Jean- Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and an intractable link between popular song and the bohemian quarter on the Left Bank of the Seine that was their playground.
Her raspy voice and minimalist yet haunting stage presence entranced audiences from the early 1950s until her late 80s, when she still dared to sing
Déshabillez- moi ( Undress me). Originally written for a striptease act, it was banned from radio and TV until 1968, when attitudes changed and it became as big a hit as Serge Gainsbourg’s Je t’aime… moi non plus.
“Gréco has a million poems in her voice,” wrote Sartre, who composed lyrics for her.
Jacques Brel and Charles Aznavour also wrote songs for her, and the American jazz musician Miles Davis fell in love with her, but realised that their relationship could never survive the less liberal attitudes of his homeland.
Born in Montpellier in the south of France, Juliette’s father was a policeman and she and her elder sister were brought up by their grandparents in Bordeaux, until their mother reappeared when Juliette was seven, whereupon they moved the Saint- Germain- des- Prés, which would be her spiritual home.
During the war, the family retreated from the capital and became active in the Resistance, leading to the arrest of Juliette’s mother in 1943. The sisters decided to return to Paris but were captured by the Gestapo and sent to a women’s prison.
Juliette was 16 at the time and upon her release, walked the eight miles back to the city to retrieve her belongings from Gestapo headquarters. Her former French teacher and her mother’s friend, Hélène Duc, took her in.
Following the liberation, she immersed herself in the bohemian culture of the Left Bank, attended acting classes and began to host a radio show on poetry. She befriended the playwright Jean Cocteau and was given a role in his 1950 film, Orphée. It was to be the first of many screen appearances.
By that time she had been seen in magazines as one of the “new young people” of
Montparnasse, and, encouraged by Sartre, began singing in nightclubs. She did not leave the stage until her worldwide farewell tour, Merci, in 2015 when she was 87.
She married three times, to the actor Philippe Lemaire in 1953, another actor, Michel Piccoli, in 1966, and to the pianist Gérard Jouannest, and her lovers reputedly included the racing driver Jean- Pierre Wimille, singer Sacha Distel and Hollywood producer Darryl F Zanuck.
Laurence- Marie, her daughter from her first marriage, died from cancer in 2016, at 62, and Juliette suffered a stroke the same year.