49 Fun Facts About Édith Piaf

What was Édith Piaf's surname at birth?

Gassion was the name of her father Louis, a street acrobat: she sang under it until she was 19, when the nightclub owner who discovered her rechristened her 'La Môme Piaf'.

Piaf's first name is said to honour which British nurse, executed two months before her birth?

Edith Cavell was shot by a German firing squad in October 1915 for helping Allied soldiers escape occupied Belgium, and the outcry was still fresh when Piaf was born that December.

In French slang, what does 'piaf' mean?

A small bird, above all a sparrow: under five feet tall, the nervous young street singer was billed as 'La Môme Piaf', the kid sparrow, and the name stuck.

Which Hollywood blockbuster uses Piaf's 'Non, je ne regrette rien' as a recurring signal in its plot?

Inception: the song is the cue that a 'kick' out of the dream is coming, and Hans Zimmer built the film's booming score from slowed-down fragments of Piaf's recording.

Where did Édith Piaf's grandmother bring her up for several years in Normandy?

In a brothel: her father's mother ran the house in the Norman town of Bernay, and the women who worked there helped look after the little girl.

Piaf claimed she was cured of childhood blindness after a pilgrimage honouring which saint?

Thérèse of Lisieux got the credit: Piaf said her sight came back, after about four years of near-blindness, when the women who looked after her took her to pray at the young nun's grave.

In 2023 Warner Music announced a Piaf biopic that would be narrated by what?

An AI copy of her voice, trained on hundreds of old recordings with her estate's blessing; her executors said hearing it felt like being back in the room with her.

Piaf's only child, Marcelle, died at the age of two from which illness?

Meningitis killed Marcelle, born when Piaf was a 17-year-old street singer; she never had another child, and decades later mother and daughter were laid in the same grave.

Which nightclub owner discovered Piaf singing on the street in 1935?

Louis Leplée heard her singing on a street corner, put her on at his club off the Champs-Élysées and packed her opening night with celebrities, Maurice Chevalier among them.

According to the legend carved on a Paris plaque, where was Édith Piaf born?

On a doorstep in the street, sheltered by a policeman's cape, runs the tale that she and her mother liked to tell; her birth certificate records a hospital delivery instead.

What happened in April 1936 to the nightclub owner who had discovered Piaf?

He was murdered at home by intruders who were never caught; Piaf was questioned by police and cleared, but the scandal nearly finished her career before it had begun.

Which lyricist and lover rebuilt Piaf's image in the late 1930s and gave her the stage name Édith Piaf?

Raymond Asso shut her old street acquaintances out, shortened 'La Môme Piaf' to Édith Piaf, and had songs written that turned her years on the streets into her act.

Which composer, Piaf's favourite collaborator, wrote the music for her hit 'Milord'?

Marguerite Monnot set Piaf's moods to music for some 25 years, until a newcomer with a single song in 1960 pushed her aside as the singer's composer of choice.

In 1940 Piaf co-starred in the one-act play Le Bel Indifférent, written by which poet and filmmaker?

Jean Cocteau wrote it for her, and the friendship lasted to the end: in October 1963 he died of a heart attack within hours of being told that Piaf was dead.

At the Moulin Rouge in 1944 Piaf worked with, and began an affair with, which singer-actor?

Yves Montand was a little-known singer when she took him under her wing: she coached him, put him in her film Étoile sans lumière, and within a couple of years he was a star in his own right.

After the Liberation of France, Piaf had to answer to a tribunal on suspicion of what?

Collaborating with the Germans, for whom she had sung in occupied Paris; she was cleared after her secretary, a Resistance member, testified that her visits to prison camps had helped French prisoners escape.

A devoted fan opened the only museum dedicated to Édith Piaf in what kind of Paris building?

His own small apartment: Bernard Marchois, who met Piaf as a teenager, gave two rooms of his fourth-floor flat to her tiny shoes, letters and gold discs, and visitors had to telephone for an appointment.

Which singer turned 'La Vie en rose' into a disco-era single from her 1977 debut album?

Grace Jones, until then best known as a fashion model, stretched Piaf's ballad into a seven-minute dance track on Portfolio, her first album.

At which New York concert hall did Piaf triumph in 1956 and return the following year?

Carnegie Hall crowned a turnaround: her first American audiences were cool towards her, until a glowing review in a New York paper changed her fortunes and won her a following.

Which French boxing champion did Piaf fall in love with during a 1947 tour of America?

Marcel Cerdan was married with three children, so the affair made headlines around the world; it lasted barely two years, yet she never got over him.

Piaf's boxer lover died in 1949 when his flight crashed approaching a refuelling stop in which islands?

The Azores: his Paris to New York flight flew into a mountain there on its way in to refuel, killing all 48 on board; he was hurrying to join Piaf, who was singing in New York.

Which song did Piaf record in May 1950 and dedicate to her lover killed in the 1949 air crash?

Hymne à l'amour was written for him while he was alive: she first sang it in September 1949, a few weeks before the crash turned her love song into a lament.

Piaf's long dependence on which drug began with the treatment she was given after a 1951 car crash?

Morphine, prescribed by her doctors after the first of three serious car crashes: with drink, it turned her last decade into a round of clinics, collapses and comebacks.

Which future star spent the early 1950s as Piaf's secretary, chauffeur and songwriter before she launched his career?

Charles Aznavour drove her, kept her diary and wrote her songs such as 'Plus bleu que tes yeux'; in return she took him on tour and taught him the tricks of the trade.

Who acted as matron of honour at Piaf's 1952 wedding to singer Jacques Pills?

Marlene Dietrich stood beside her at the 1952 wedding; Pills spent the marriage trying, without lasting success, to get his bride off drink and drugs.

Piaf's second husband, Théo Sarapo, was 20 years her junior and had formerly worked as what?

A hairdresser of 26 when they married, Sarapo was pushed on stage by Piaf as her last protégé; seven years after her death he was killed in a road accident and buried beside her.

Théo Sarapo's stage name, chosen by Piaf, approximates a Greek phrase meaning what?

I love you, s'agapo in Greek: Piaf coined the name for Theophanis Lamboukas, the Paris-born son of Greek parents, when she set about turning him into a singer.

Piaf and Sarapo had a hit duet in 1962 with which song?

À quoi ça sert l'amour ? casts him as the doubter who asks what love is for and her as the one who knows; Sarapo had never sung before, and she coached him through the recording.

Who composed 'Non, je ne regrette rien', the song Piaf made her anthem in 1960?

Charles Dumont had been turned down by Piaf several times and nearly didn't go back; she kept him waiting, heard the song through, and declared it would go round the world.

Piaf dedicated her recording of 'Non, je ne regrette rien' to which body, which adopted the song as its own?

The French Foreign Legion: paratroopers of its 1st regiment, broken up after backing the failed 1961 putsch in Algiers, marched out of barracks singing it, and Legion soldiers sent a wreath to her coffin.

How did Piaf's mother, who left her as a baby, earn her living?

As a café singer, billed as Line Marsa: she walked away from her newborn daughter, and it was that daughter who became the most famous voice France has produced.

Who wrote the lyrics of 'Milord' (1959) while living with Piaf, at the age of about 24?

Georges Moustaki was her lover for about a year and wrote the words during the affair; it was over by 1959, the song became a hit across Europe, and he went on to stardom as a singer himself.

In Piaf's hit 'Milord', who has fallen for the elegant English gentleman of the title?

A girl who works the port: she has watched him pass with a beautiful woman on his arm, never noticing her, and when he turns up alone and in tears she sets about cheering him up.

What does the title of Piaf's signature song, 'La Vie en rose', literally mean?

Life in pink, the French way of saying life seen through rose-tinted glasses: Piaf wrote the words herself in 1945, and it became the song the world knew her by.

On which American TV variety show did Piaf appear again and again during the 1950s?

The Ed Sullivan Show brought her back time after time through the 1950s, once American audiences, cool towards her at first, had been won round by glowing reviews.

Which Paris music hall, close to bankruptcy, was rescued by Piaf's comeback concerts at the start of the 1960s?

The Olympia was going under when its director begged her to appear; ill as she was, she sang there for weeks and launched 'Non, je ne regrette rien' in the process.

Francis Lai, co-writer of Piaf's last recording in 1963, later won an Oscar for the score of which film?

Love Story won Francis Lai the 1970 Oscar; seven years earlier he had been Piaf's young accompanist, and 'L'Homme de Berlin', which he wrote with Michèle Vendôme, was the last song she taped.

Where did Piaf's body lie in state while Parisians queued for two days to file past?

In her own apartment on the Boulevard Lannes: so many mourners gathered outside that the doors were opened to them, and most of those who filed past her coffin were women.

In which Paris cemetery is Piaf buried, in one of its most visited graves?

Père Lachaise: she lies in the family vault with her father and her little daughter, and her last husband joined them seven years later after a fatal road accident.

What reason was reported in 1963 for refusing Piaf a Catholic funeral Mass?

She had remarried after divorce, and by the Orthodox rite, said the reports of 1963, though later writers blame her 'dissolute' life; either way, a theatre chaplain still said prayers at her grave.

A fellow singer said Piaf's funeral brought about what, for the first time since the war?

Traffic came to a complete stop as the cortege crossed the city: tens of thousands lined the route, and at the cemetery the crowd broke through the barriers to reach her grave.

Who won the Academy Award for Best Actress for playing Piaf in the 2007 film La Vie en Rose?

Marion Cotillard shaved back her hairline and eyebrows for the part and sat up to five hours in make-up to become the dying singer, who looked decades older than her 47 years.

Which musical-theatre star played the title role in the 1993 London revival of the play Piaf?

Elaine Paige earned an Olivier nomination in the part that Jane Lapotaire had created in a studio theatre at Stratford in 1978 and carried to Broadway, where it won her a Tony.

Which French director filmed the story of Piaf and her boxer lover in 1983?

Claude Lelouch had to recast the boxer at the last minute: Patrick Dewaere, signed for the part, died days before filming was due to begin.

Which English playwright wrote Piaf, the 1978 play that went from Stratford to the West End and Broadway?

Pam Gems drew her as hard-drinking, promiscuous and self-destructive, a long way from the plaster saint; the play opened in a tin-hut studio at Stratford and has been revived for star after star.

In which working-class district of Paris was Édith Piaf born?

Belleville: fifty years after the Church refused her a funeral Mass, a bishop led a memorial Mass in its parish church, where she was baptised, and a statue of her stands in the Paris square that bears her name.

Which Paris institution marked Piaf's centenary in 2015 with her song sheets, handwritten notes and posters and a karaoke booth?

The Bibliothèque nationale wanted to show that it keeps popular culture as well as great literature, and let visitors belt out her hits in a karaoke box.

Why was Piaf's body secretly driven to Paris after she died on the Riviera?

So she seemed to die there: she had died at Plascassier, near Grasse, but a post-dated certificate put the death in the capital a day later, the ending her public expected of her.

Simone Berteaut's 1969 biography of Piaf contained which false claim about the author?

She was Piaf's half-sister, the book claimed; in fact 'Mômone' was the friend who had sung in the streets with her as a girl, and the singer's real half-sister was furious.