singer-songwriter Françoise Hardy’s cancer treatments are causing her such pain, that she wishes for the right to an assisted suicide, she said in an interview with French magazine Femme Acutelle, reported on by the Guardian. Such a procedure is not currently legal in France.
The performer, who saw breakthrough success in the 1960s with the yé-yé movement, previously criticized the illegality of the measure in a May interview with Paris Match, calling France “inhumane.”
In Hardy’s new interview, which reportedly took place over email due to her “difficult speaking,” she argued that her fame would also prevent any physician from aiding her. “Given my small notoriety,” she said, downplaying her stature in French culture, “no one will want to run the risk of being removed from the medical order even more.” She added that her mother was euthanized when “she could not go any further.”
Hardy was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer in the mid-2000s, according to the Guardian, which noted in 2018, “she was diagnosed with a tumor in her ear.”
Hardy came on the scene before the age of 20, in 1962, with her first hit tune “Tous les Garçons et les Filles.” Even though it was released as a B-side (against Hardy’s wishes) it became an international success. She re-recorded it in Italian, German, and English, and dozens of artists from Maurice Chevalier to the Eurythmics have performed covers.
She cross-pollinated her sound with British producers and began recording full albums in French and English. Bob Dylan wrote a poem for her and placed it on the jacket of his fourth album. Throughout the 1960s, she appeared in some small roles in highly visible films, such as Jean-Luc Godard‘s Masculin-Féminin and the Paris and London-shot romp What’s New, Pussycat? starring Peter O’Toole and Peter Sellers, and written by Woody Allen. She also appeared in John Frankenheimer’s 70mm split-screen Formula One bonanza, Grand Prix.
In the 1970s, she recorded the concept album Star with composer-producer Gabriel Yared, which approximately coincided with her interest and additional career as an astrologer. (A course led by psychedelic filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky helped lead her there.) In the late 1970s and early 1980s, she had horoscope programs on French radio and television.
Despite a much-touted final album in 1988, she collaborated with the British band Blur and the French band Air in the 1990s. This led her back to the studio to record new albums into the 2000s.
In the new millennium, her music began appearing in movies by many high profile filmmakers, including François Ozon’s‘s 8 Women, Denys Arcand‘s Oscar-winning The Barbarian Invasions, Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers, and Wes Anderson‘s Moonrise Kingdom. Music supervisor Randall Poster told Rolling Stone that he and Anderson first came across the tune “Le Temps de l’Amour” when they were working on a Japanese cell phone commercial that “called for various French pieces,” but knew they should stash it away for later use.
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