The chanson master who crooned to the world

Charles Aznavour was the hardest-working man in French show business. During his seven-decade career, the raspy-voiced crooner, often called France’s Frank Sinatra, wrote some 1,200 songs and sold more than 180 million records. He appeared in more than 60 movies—most famously as the titular musician in François Truffaut’s 1960 crime drama, Shoot the Piano Player—and sang to sold-out concert halls into his 90s. “Everywhere, all the time, I work and write,” he said in 2015, before a bravura two-hour performance at London’s Albert Hall. “My wife says, ‘Stop working!You are old enough to stop.’ I say, ‘If I stop, I die.’” Aznavour was born in Paris to Armenian parents who “had come to France fleeing Turkish oppression,” said The New York Times. He began performing in nightclubs in his teens, and in 1946 the famed chanteuse Edith Piaf took him under her wing, “as a songwriter and secretary but, he insisted, not a lover.” He struggled to launch his own musical career—critics said the 5-foot-3 singer was too short and too ugly—but in the late 1950s Aznavour began to captivate audiences with bittersweet “songs of love found and love lost.” His hits gleefully broke taboos, said The Washington Post. There was 1965’s “Après l’Amour,” a bannedfrom-radio ballad of postcoital exhaustion, and 1972’s “Comme Ils Disent,” “a first-person narrative of a gay man’s heartache.” Still, the establishment embraced him: He won France’s National Order of Merit in 2001 and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2007. Despite the frequent Sinatra comparisons, Aznavour said that if he had settled in the U.S., he’d have gone to Nashville. “Country music tells stories,” he said, “and my songs tell stories.”