Charles Aznavour obituary; Last survivor of the golden era of French chanson who sold more than 100 million records in career spanning 70 years
When Charles Aznavour began his singing career in postwar Paris, the French critics dismissed him as too short and too ugly. They also hated his voice.
Far from being discouraged by such unpromising notices, the barbs acted as a spur and he went on to become France’s most celebrated singing star, writing about 1,200 songs and selling more than 100 million records during a 70-year career. He was the last survivor of the golden era of French chanson. Aznavour became known as the French Frank Sinatra and not just for his songs. Both also acted in films, were notorious womanisers and kept coming out of retirement for “one last concert”.
“The critics were very harsh,” he recalled on his 90th birthday. “They said I was short and I agree, I’m not tall. But what they said about my voice was unfair.” Aznavour also recalled that one particularly prejudiced review asked: “Why have they let a cripple on stage?”
“Was it because I was Armenian? The son of an immigrant, who started working on stage in Paris when I was nine? But they helped me; pushing me and kicking me to prove myself.”
If, by his own admission, he lacked the obvious glamour of Sacha Distel, he was able to captivate his audiences by singing with a plaintive, but soulful, intensity about the ordinary joys and sorrows of life. His songs were seemingly hewn from a wide personal experience, and delivered with charismatic intimacy and melancholy. “He sings with his heart,” said Jean Cocteau, the novelist.
Early in his career Aznavour was so sensitive about his height (he was 5ft 3in tall) and his appearance that he had cosmetic surgery on his nose, which he described as “not like a nose, but a long, long can-opener”. The operation, he later claimed, was not his idea but was arranged by Édith Piaf, for whom he wrote songs and who became a close friend after he had opened shows for her at the Moulin Rouge.
“One day, she said, ‘Ah Charles, your nose is terrible, I know a great man.’ I was not rich, so Édith and my publisher split the price and I had the surgery. The day after they took the bandages off, she looked at me and said, ‘I loved it better before.’ “
In later years Aznavour turned his lack of height into a source of self- deprecating humour and exuded a disarming modesty and unassuming nature that those who knew him well insisted was genuine. “I’m not grand,” he said. “I don’t go out and say, ‘Hello, I’m here!’ I don’t want to be that man who looks at himself and says, ‘This is my life.’ I want to be the normal man who goes out with farmers and working people.”
Dubbed “the Love Pixie” by sections of the media, women found Aznavour irresistible. There were rumours of affairs with Audrey Hepburn and Britt Ekland, which he denied, and an acknowledged affair with the teenage Liza Minnelli. “But to have a love affair with so much distance between us, it’s difficult to be faithful,” he said.
He and Piaf were flatmates for several years. “We had many things in common: the street, the songs, the way of life, the love and the drink. We drank everything,” he said. “We really loved each other, but it was not sexual. That’s what saved us.”
His first marriage, in 1946 to Micheline Rugel, produced a daughter, Séda, a singer who occasionally duetted with her father, and a son, Charles. In 1956 he married Evelyne Plessis, with whom he had a son Patrick, who committed suicide in 1981. The marriage ended in a messy and expensive alimony case. In 1967 he married Ulla Thorsell, who was almost 20 years his junior, in a glitzy ceremony in Las Vegas. They had a daughter, Katia, a singer, and two sons Mischa, an actor, and Nicholas, who managed his father’s business affairs.
“You’ve got to learn to leave the table when love is no longer being served,” he once sang, but he remained devoted to his third wife and claimed that they did not have a single argument in almost half a century of married life. “I was not faithful between the wives, which was fun,” he said. “But it became boring. You want a normal life – marriage and children.”
Aznavour’s reputation as a womaniser – deserved or not – was reinforced by his poetic songs about “love and other sorrows”, as he put it. “I’m not an expert on love, but I can write about it because I can get into how a woman feels,” he said.
“She may be the face I can’t forget, / a trace of pleasure or regret, / maybe my treasure / or the price I have to pay,” he sang on She, his most famous English-language composition, which topped the British charts in 1974. He also recorded the song in French, German, Italian and Spanish, all of which he spoke fluently.
Aznavour’s songs also tackled difficult subjects. “It’s a kind of sickness I have, talking about things you’re not supposed to talk about. I wanted to break every taboo,” he said. He wrote about masculinity and libido, depression, sex, prejudice and rape. His 1972 song What Makes a Man(Comme Ils Disent) about a gay transvestite was one of the first to deal openly with homosexual love. The steamy Après L’Amour, about post-coital exhaustion, was one of several of his songs that were banned by French radio in the 1960s.
The realism and candour that were his trademarks were heard nowhere better than on You’ve Let Yourself Go(Tu T’laisses Aller), the plea of a man who still loves his wife even though she has grown fat and unattractive (“I gaze at you in sheer despair and see your mother standing there”). He countered accusations of misogyny by writing another version from a woman’s angle (“You never care the way you dress, you stay unshaven, you look a mess”), which Minnelli recorded.
Others who recorded his songs included Fred Astaire, Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Ray Charles, Tom Jones, Shirley Bassey and Plácido Domingo. Elvis Costello even managed to put She back in the charts in 1999 when he covered it for the soundtrack of Notting Hill, which starred Hugh Grant.
He was born Shahnour Varinag Aznavourian in Paris in 1924. His parents were Armenian and had recently arrived in France as refugees from the Turkish massacres. Aznavour remained proud of his Armenian roots and, after the 1988 earthquake, he set up a charity, Aznavour for Armenia. In 2008 he took up dual citizenship and became Armenian ambassador to Switzerland, splitting his time between his home there and a mansion near Marseilles. The Armenians even established a Charles Aznavour Museum in Yerevan, although he insisted that France defined his identity: “I’ve always felt totally French. That vexes the Armenians, but they’re used to it.”
His father had been a singer, but in Paris he became a restaurateur. He soon went bankrupt, however, because he offered free meals to fellow exiles. The family lived in a single room. Aznavour left school at the age of nine to take small acting roles and sang for loose change on the streets. He survived the German occupation of Paris in the Second World War singing in cabarets, while his parents hid Armenians and Jews in their apartment and his father joined the resistance.
Aznavour started to write songs with Pierre Roche. After the war he met Piaf, who began recording the songs. Yet, as a performer it took years to overcome the prejudice against him and despite Piaf promoting him, it was the mid-1950s before he became established as a singing star in his own right.
A parallel acting career followed when in 1960, he played the haunted piano- player in François Truffaut’s classic “new-wave” film Shoot the Piano Player (Tirez sur le Pianist). He acted in more than 60 films, although none was as distinguished and most were banal.
In 1978 he was charged by the French authorities with tax evasion. Aznavour claimed to have paid backhanders to figures from all sides of the political spectrum to keep the case out of court. If true it didn’t work for he was found guilty and fined 10 million francs, which prompted him to leave France to live just over the border in Switzerland. “But I was never a tax exile because I didn’t have a penny when I left,” he said.
Aznavour continued to write, record and tour into old age, with several Sinatra-style retirements and comebacks along the way. He played at the Albert Hall, London, in November 2015 at the age of 91 when he gave a bravura two-hour performance, albeit with the help of a hearing-aid and autocue.
“Everywhere, all the time, I work and write,” he said shortly before the concert. “I love a clean white page. My wife says, ‘Stop working! You are old enough to stop.’ I say, ‘If I stop, I die.’ “
Aznavour was right. His latest world tour continued into this year.Charles Aznavour, singer, was born on May 22, 1924. He died on October 1, 2018, aged 94