Piaf: the triumphant return of La Môme

Her life was blighted by a plane crash, alcoholism and dramatic collapses on stage - but the 'kid sparrow' still provided the soundtrack to her nation, as a new film recalls.By John Lichfield

Of the 12 avenues which converge at the Arc de Triomphe, the Avenue Macmahon is probably the dullest and least visited. If you walk down its right-hand side, there is nothing - no plaque on the wall, no marker - to tell you that popular musical history was made here, 71 years ago.

In October 1935, two tiny, emaciated young women in ragged skirts came to the angle of the Avenue Macmahon and the Rue Troyon from the poor districts of north-eastern Paris. They stood on a corner which was then a Metro entrance, but is now the exit ramp from an underground car park.

One of the young women, no taller than a 10-year-old, began to sing in a booming, haunting voice, which seemed too large to come from such a small body. Her friend went around with a woollen beret collecting money from passers-by. An audience gathered. They included Louis Leplée, who owned a cabaret just off the Champs-Elysées.

He invited the singer - Edith Gassion, 20 years old and 4ft 8in tall - to come and see him at his club. He gave her a job, but insisted that she change her stage name to La Môme Piaf - the kid sparrow.

And so it was that M. Leplée, a once-famous man long forgotten, "discovered" Edith Piaf, who has never been forgotten. She became the best-known and best-loved of all French singers, both inside and outside France.

Her voice - raw, rich, passionate, gritty, tragic, joyful - made her an icon of a timeless Frenchness, like berets, dark tobacco, soft cheese, yellow car headlights, red wine or the burnt-rubber smell of the Paris Metro.

Some of those icons have long ago disappeared, but Piaf's popularity endured, at home and abroad, for many years after her death in 1963. To the Madonna, Kylie and Beyoncé generations, she is, perhaps, less well known.

In the next few months, the world, old and young, French and foreign, has an opportunity to discover Edith Piaf again. A new film about her life, La Môme, premieres at the Berlin Film Festival today, and in France next week. It will be shown in Britain and America as La Vie en Rose, probably from 8 June.

Marion Cotillard, a French actress who looks rather like Piaf, plays the starring role with extraordinary success, according to the few French critics who have been invited to advance viewings. "Her interpretation of Edith Piaf surpasses what is generally expected of an actress," Le Monde said.

The inescapable Gérard Dépardieu appears as Louis Leplée, who was murdered soon after discovering Piaf.

La Môme, directed and written by Olivier Dahan, is being billed in France as not just a film but a "film-événement" - a cinematic sensation. France loves, even more than Britain, to dwell on its recent past, and the movie has set off an avalanche of Piaf nostalgia: television and radio programmes, special editions of magazines and compilations of her most successful songs.

Advance hype for French films is often misleading. Several would-be blockbusters in recent years have collapsed like soufflés. All the same, given the subject and judging by the breathless advance praise, La Môme should be the most successful French film, at home and abroad since Amelie in 2001.

Several scenes were filmed with live audiences at the Olympia music hall in Paris, one of Piaf's most famous stamping grounds. Marion Cotillard appears on stage in Piaf's trademark black dress, pencilled-on eyebrows and scarlet lipstick. She sings a few bars, but mostly mimes to original Piaf recordings.

The film therefore has classic versions of some of the most powerful popular songs in any language: "Je ne Regrette Rien", "Milord" and "La Vie en Rose", and many others.

"The image most people have of her is that of the fragile icon in a black dress of the 1950s and 1960s," Dahan said. "I wanted to look at a very different, less distinct person that I had seen in a little known picture of her, as a young woman, before she was called Edith Piaf."

The movie begins near the end of Piaf's life. She is seen collapsing on stage - a frequent occurrence. The script then flashes backwards and forwards over her serial love affairs and heart-breaks, her alcohol abuse and drug addiction. It ranges from her deprived childhood (she was brought up on the streets and in a brothel) to her international triumphs (she was the first popular singer to appear at the Carnegie Hall, the classical music venue in New York, and its Paris equivalent, the Salle Pleyel).

By a popular legend, invented by Piaf herself, she was born virtually in the gutter. A plaque placed by the Paris town hall at her alleged birthplace at 72 Rue de Belleville reads: "On the steps of this house, was born on 19 December 1915, in the greatest possible destitution, Edith Piaf, whose voice would shake the world." In truth, according to her birth certificate, Piaf was born in a hospital nearby. She was the daughter of a street acrobat and a half-French, half-Algerian street singer. Her mother abandoned the family and she was brought up by her Algerian grandmother, Aïcha, and then by a family friend who lived in a maison close or brothel.

For a couple of years, she was sent to live on a farm near Bernay in Normandy, but was re-called by her father, who needed her to collect money during his street performances. Father and daughter rapidly discovered that they could make more money from Edith's singing than from Louis's back flips. Edith, at 15, quarrelled with her father and branched out on her own with her friend Simone, or "Momone" (played in the movie by Sylvie Testud) passing around the beret.

At 18, Edith gave birth to a daughter, Marcelle, and abandoned the street life. When Marcelle (who was to be her only child) died of meningitis at the age of two, Edith returned to singing in the streets, and was spotted by M. Leplée. She was an immediate success, and recorded her first 78rpm single, "Les Momes de la Cloche", in 1936. Changing her name to Edith Piaf, she became a French, but not international, singing, theatre and film star before war broke out in 1939. She mixed with the Parisian intellectual elite (asking other friends to read their books and tell her what they were about). She behaved courageously during the Nazi occupation, touring France with a band which included Jewish musicians.

After the liberation, Piaf had a whirlwind affair with a young singer called Yves Montand (whom she launched to fame), and then met the love of her life, the world middleweight boxing champion Marcel Cerdan.

The boxer's death in a plane crash in 1949 sent her into spiral of alcohol and drug abuse from which she never fully recovered. Piaf managed, however, between love affairs with younger men, car crashes and collapses on stage, to build her international reputation.

Audiences in the US rejected her at first. The dramatic singing style, the sober black dress and absence of jewels were not showbiz enough, too European. A theatre in Las Vegas asked Piaf to change into sequins and pearls - at least for her final number. She declined. The theatre refused to allow her to go on stage, but paid her fee anyway.

Eventually, the power of Piaf's voice and personality triumphed. By the end of the 1950s she became hugely popular in the US as both a recording star and a live performer. Other love affairs, marriages and bouts of alcoholism followed; Piaf would have been a tabloid gold mine today. In the mid-1950s, she took up with another young singer, who became her confidant, secretary and chauffeur. She also launched his singing career. His name was Charles Aznavour.

"No one had such a love of life, while destroying herself physically," he said. "She would ask things of you in the piping voice of a little girl, if that suited her, or in the bullying, angry tone at which she also excelled. Everyone was subdued by her. We were willing prisoners of her power."

Piaf badgered Aznavour for months to have plastic surgery on his nose, which she said was too big and ugly for a popular singer. He eventually had the operation and presented himself for inspection. "I preferred you before," Piaf said.

In 1960, Piaf, exhausted, decided to retire. In October of that year, she was persuaded to make a comeback by two young songwriters. At first she refused to see them or take their song seriously. "When I started playing the piano, Piaf's attitude changed immediately," recalled one of the writers, Charles Dumont. "She made me play it over and over again, maybe five or six times. She said that it was magnificent, wonderful. That it was made for her. That it was her. That it would be her resurrection."

The song was called "Je ne Regrette Rien". Its soaring chords and its theme - weariness and cynicism defeated by love - were made for Piaf. Her recording was an international triumph, at a time when Johnny Hallyday was already performing in France and the Beatles were appearing at The Cavern Club in Liverpool.

"Je ne Regrette Rien" remains one of the most popular songs of all time. It was Piaf's last great hit and her epitaph. Her career was briefly resurrected by it, but she died three years later. She was 47, but looked 67. For the final scenes of the movie, Marion Cotillard, 31, had to be so heavily disguised as the dying Piaf that her make-up took six hours to apply.

The producer of the film, Alain Goldman, says: "Piaf is one of those rare people who is loved by both men and women, the young and the old. There is something about her voice which fascinates people. Everyone can identify with her.

"Her unique standing goes well beyond France. There has been great interest in this film from many countries, including the Americans and the British, who are often hermetically sealed against French films."

Another friend of Piaf, Jean Noli, wrote a book about the final years of her life - Piaf Secréte, which provided much source material for the movie. He said of her: "Piaf was the end of music hall... after her, there was only showbusiness."

Since Piaf, France has never found another female singer to project, or keep alive, the tradition of Chanson Française (just as no male singer has replaced Jacques Brel). Since the early 1960s, French popular music has been dominated by imitations of American and British rock, pop or rap.

Then again, few popular singers, in any style or at any time, have managed to fuse their music with the pain and joy of their own lives, like Edith Piaf. After her, there are many great performers, but they are just performers. Piaf starred in the musical of her own life.