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00:00Before becoming an icon of French pop who would mark generations,
00:06Françoise Ardy thought of becoming a nun. Ardy, born in Paris in 1944, changed her
00:12mind when she discovered Elvis Presley and rock and roll as a teenager. At the
00:18age of 17, she signed to the Vogue record label, meeting Johnny Halliday and
00:22releasing her first single. In 1962, she had her first big hit,
00:27Tous les garçons et les filles, making her a national star.
00:38She took part in the Eurovision Song Contest in 1963, representing Monaco, and
00:44sales of her early hits such as Le Tombe de l'amour and Comment te dire adieu
00:48rivaled the Beatles in France. A massive star at the age of 20, Ardy, with her
00:54signature fringe, high boots and miniskirt, embodied the look of an era.
00:58She moved into acting and formed a celebrity couple with another French pop
01:03icon, Jacques Dutronc. They would have a son, Thomas, in 1973, the year of Ardy's
01:10hit, Message Personnel.
01:18Worn out by touring, Françoise Ardy put her career on hold in the late 1980s.
01:23She wrote songs for other artists and also astrology books. Her final decades
01:28were marked by health problems. In 2004, she was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer.
01:32After coming close to dying, she recovered and released a somber album,
01:37Persons d'Eau, in 2018.
01:43Françoise Ardy would die of cancer at the age of 80. In her final years, she
01:48publicly advocated for a change to French law to allow assisted suicide.