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Dec 18, 2015 · The French have declared her the "Singer of the Century." Édith Piaf was born 100 years ago, on December 19, 1915. Her career was legendary; her life was filled with myth and tragedy. When she ...
Feb 15, 2022 · Although she achieved wealth and international stardom, right from the start Edith Piaf’s life was undeniably tough. Edith Gassion (1915-1963) was born into a family of poverty-stricken street performers in Paris and abandoned by her free-wheeling mother at birth. She lived briefly with her maternal grandmother, but in 1916 went to live with ...
Jun 28, 2021 · The Tragic Real-Life Story Of Edith Piaf. Edith Piaf's life and music were filled with sadness, tragedy, glamour, and triumph — so quintessentially French, it can be placed in a box with baguettes, berets, and the Eiffel Tower. Coming in at just 4 feet 10 inches, Ed Sullivan called her "the most amazing 97 pounds in the business," notes the ...
- She Had Another Story
- She Shared Her Name with A Tragic Hero
- She Was Abandoned
- Like Father, Like Daughter
- She Lived with Prostitutes
- She Couldn’T Say “No”
- She Went Blind
- She Experienced A Miracle
- She Took to The Street
- She Met A Long-Lost Relative
From the very beginning, Edith Piaf knew how to make a dramatic entrance. Although her birth certificate said she was born at the Hospital Tenon in Paris, she had a different story to tell. On December 19, 1915, Edith claimed that her mother—Annetta Maillard—never made it to the hospital. With a no-show ambulance, Maillard delivered her on the fron...
Piaf’s parents named her with courage in mind. Her name—Edith—comes from a British WWI nurse named Edith Cavell who risked her life for the sake of French troopers. After rescuing them from the Germans, Cavell faced a death sentence. They executed her only two months before Piaf’s birth. While both women led wildly different lives, they had many th...
Some say there’s no love as unconditional as a mother’s love for her child. That is, unless your mother is Edith Piaf’s. Sadly, Piaf’s mother wanted nothing to do with her and abandoned her at birth. For some of her childhood, she lived with her maternal grandmother, but in the end, she belonged to her father. And with WWI raging on, he had a diffi...
Piaf’s father—Louis Alphonse Gassion—was an acrobat with a theatrical past. He was a street performer hailing from Normandy, and as time would tell, these dramatic affinities one day blossomed in his own daughter. But in 1916, he had WWI to consider, and when he enlisted, he had no choice but to leave Piaf in the care of his mother—a woman with qui...
In Bernay, Normandy, Piaf’s grandmother welcomed the girl into her scandalous life. She ran a bordello—or what some called “a house of ill repute.” When Piaf's father went off to fight, he left his baby girl there. Some say it takes a village to raise a child, but it only took a house full of her grandmother’s “employees” to raise Edith. These resi...
With her turbulent romantic history, it’s no wonder Edith Piaf insists that her life growing up in the bordello influenced her weakness for men. For one, the importance of consent was woefully skewed for Piaf. She once reminisced, saying, “I thought when a boy called a girl, the girl would never refuse.” But as a child, Piaf’s physical illnesses fu...
During a chapter of her childhood, Edith Piaf couldn’t see at all. She suffered from keratitis—an inflammatory condition that affects the cornea of the eye. Her blindness woke pity in the hearts of her grandmother and the other girls. Together, they decided to pool money in an effort to find a cure for Piaf’s unfortunate condition. But sadly, the m...
The proposed cure for young Piaf’s blindness was…unconventional, to say the least. The money for Piaf’s eyes went toward a very special pilgrimage—a spiritual journey in the name of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. When Piaf’s eyesight saw considerable improvement, everyone around her believed that this healing was a downright miracle. With her sight grat...
At the age of 14, Edith Piaf was ready to start making some money. After returning from battle, her father went back to his acrobatic profession. Finally old enough to earn her keep, Piaf and her father began trudging the streets together, setting up shop on corners and performing for the everyday masses. Her songbird voice rang true through the ci...
Only a year into performing, Piaf met a very important person—her sister. Or to be more accurate, her half-sister, Simone “Momone” Berteaut. So little is known about Momone that some say that there’s a possibility that she wasn’t Piaf’s sister at all. Either way, they became soul sisters in the end. Momone joined Piaf on the street, and together, t...
May 22, 2024 · Edith Piaf. Edith Piaf was a French singer. She is considered the greatest icon of French popular music. Albeit her short physical stature, audiences the world over were amazed by her powerful vocals. Her music embodied the wretched life of the streets of Paris and was highly sentimental and passionate. Steeped in poverty and abandoned by her ...
Oct 6, 2024 · Edith Piaf was a French whose expressive interpretations of the , or French ballad, made her internationally famous. Among her trademark songs were “Non, je ne regrette rien” (“No, I Don’t Regret Anything”) and “La Vie en rose” (“Life in Pink”). She moved audiences with her passionate renditions of songs about loss and love.
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No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf, by Carolyn Burke. Chicago Review Press, 2012. ISBN 9781613743928 "The Sparrow – Edith Piaf", chapter in Singers & The Song (pp. 23–43), by Gene Lees, Oxford University Press, 1987, insightful critique of Piaf's biography and music. Oh! Père Lachaise, by Jim Yates, Édition d'Amèlie 2007, ISBN 978-0 ...
