Juliette Gréco, the French singer, actress, cultural icon and muse to existentialist philosophers of the country’s post-War period, died on Wednesday aged 93, reports ABC News.
They said Gréco died in her Ramatuelle house in the south of France, near Saint Tropez.
The mayor of Nice, Christian Estrosi, tweeted that “a very grand lady, an immense artist has gone.”
With expressive eyes inherited from her Greek ancestors and an impossibly deep, raspy voice -- acquired from years of cigarette-smoking -- Gréco immortalized some of France’s most recognizable songs in an enduring seven-decade career, including the classics “Soul le ciel de Paris” (Under the Parisian sky) and “Je hais les dimanches” (I hate Sundays).
Gréco was born in Montpellier on February 7th 1927, to an absent father, Gérard Gréco, and a mother from Bordeaux, Juliette Lafeychine — from whom, she told a 1986 French documentary, she received little love. “You are not my daughter,” Gréco quoted her mother as saying.
After a lonely childhood, Gréco became a devotee of bohemian trends among intellectuals in post-war France, beginning as an actress in Paris in 1946. It was in the artistic hub of the Left Bank that she met philospher Jean-Paul Sartre, who famously said she had “millions of poems in her voice.”
She knew many of the writers and artists working in Saint-Germain-des-Près, such as Albert Camus, Jacques Prevert, Jean Cocteau and Boris Vian, and gained the popular nickname “the muse of existentialism.”
Artistically, Gréco flourished upon meeting Serge Gainsbourg in the late 1950′s, then a young musician whose talent was revitalizing French song. Gainsbourg wrote her songs for five years from 1959 and she recorded ten of them, including “La Javanaise” (The woman from Java) which earned her considerable acclaim.
A fashion icon whose bobbed hair, Cleopatra-style eye-lines and austere black clothes became synonymous with the France of May 1968, Gréco became a role model to many, including British Swinging Sixties icon, singer and feminist Marianne Faithfull, who was quoted as saying: “If I want to be anybody, I want to be Juliette Gréco.”
Paul McCartney said in a 2007 interview that the Beatles’ 1965 classic “Michelle” was inspired by Gréco, who epitomized the cool of the era far beyond France.
“We’d tag along to these parties, and it was at the time of people like Juliette Gréco... So I used to pretend to be French, and I had this song that turned out later to be ‘Michelle,’” he said.