"Love is an indispensable food of every human being." - Edith Piaf
The famous chanteuse Edith Piaf was born Edith Giovanna Gassion in 1915 in Paris into a French-Italian artistic family - her father was a theater actor and street acrobat, her mother a café singer. Little Edith, however, did not grow up with her parents, but with both grandmothers: the first was of Berber descent from Morocco, the second came from Normandy, where she ran a brothel. The girls employed in it also took care of little Edith in their free time. When Edith was fourteen, she joined her father and they traveled all over France - she also sang in public for the first time.
Edith was discovered in 1935 by Louis Leplé, the owner of a Parisian nightclub. When she first performed, he nicknamed her "La Môme Piaf" (meaning something like "The Little Sparrow"), which was inspired by her small stature - she measured only 142 cm. Leplée taught her the basics of stage presence and told her to wear a black dress, which became her trademark apparel.
During and shortly after World War II, Piaf became a very popular artist in France. She also helped to start the singing and acting careers of Yves Montand and Charles Aznavour, both of whom would become chanson and silver screen stars.
She survived several severe car accidents, but she alleviated the pain from them with morphine and alcohol, which led to her becoming addicted. Nevertheless, she still sang great, releasing songs such as Padam… padam…, l'Accordéoniste, La Foule, Milord, or Non, je ne regrette rien. In the 1950s, Edith was famous not only in Europe but also overseas, as she succeeded in the United States: she appeared many times at the Ed Sullivan Show and twice at the famous Carnegie Hall. In France, concerts in the Olympia Hall were important to her, and recordings from five of them (1955, 1956, 1958, 1961, 1962) still sell well on various media. In 1959, Edith played her last major film role in Les Amants de demain.
Edith Piaf died in 1963 due to liver cancer in Plascaisser, southern France, near the town of Grasse. She was less than forty-eight years old.