Edith Piaf

Édith Piaf, born Édith Giovanna Gassion in 1915, had a voice that could fill a music hall and empty your heart. She started out as a teenager touring with her father, and in 1935 the Paris night club owner Louis Leplée discovered her. Her fame grew during the German occupation, and in 1945 she wrote the words to "La Vie en rose", the tune that would follow her everywhere.

By the late 1940s she was France's most popular entertainer, with tours of Europe, South America and the United States, and there she made eight appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show. Her specialty was chanson réaliste, torch songs of love, loss and sorrow that often drew on her own life, sung with a raw, trembling force that made every one sound like a confession. Her best-known songs include "Hymne à l'amour", "Padam, padam...", "La Foule" and "Milord", and "Non, je ne regrette rien" sits right beside "La Vie en rose" at the top of the pile.

She kept performing, including runs of concerts at the Paris Olympia, until a few months before she died in 1963, aged 47. Her final recording, "L'Homme de Berlin", was made that April with her husband Théo Sarapo. Films and documentaries have kept telling her story ever since, among them the Academy Award-winning La Vie en Rose in 2007.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.