Le polichinelle edith piaf biography vie en rose

Helen Brown. Though not a conventional beauty, the 4ft 10in diva was a volcano of drama, whose murky tales of murder, abandonment and prostitution were given an added frisson by her guttural vibrato. Piaf sang through the war as through the tragedies in her personal life, which included the death of her two-year-old daughter from meningitis in and that of her great love, the boxer Marcel Cerdan, who was killed in a plane crash in Performing for the occupying Germans as well as her fellow countrymen, Piaf was briefly branded a collaborator.

But rumours of Nazi-pleasing were firmly quashed in when resistance leaders revealed that Piaf had smuggled maps and compasses to French POWs during her prison camp tours.

Le polichinelle edith piaf biography vie en rose: La Vie En Rose

She also posed for photographs with inmates; the photographs were used to create fake identity documents and enabled many prisoners to escape. After the war, as France sucked up Marshall Plan money and morale-boosting jazz records from the US, Piaf went for a drink with her friend Marianne Michel. Michel recorded the song first — a sweet, xylophone-frosted version — with Piaf laying down her own, definitive version two years later.

Her version sold more than 1m copies and made her name across the Atlantic, where Americans were startled to behold such a tiny woman in a simple black frock, exuding none of the Hollywood glamour to which they were accustomed. In , Louis Armstrong gave the song a sumptuous treatment with a sleepy trumpet solo that starts out on a bed of solo piano glissandos and blooms against a big band finale.

Fellow disco diva Donna Summer recorded a rather bland version in But it was Pascal of Bollywood who gave the best modern account of the song in