Pop culture icon Françoise Hardy has died – Technologist

The French singer and pop culture icon Françoise Hardy was a constant presence for five decades. She remained the symbol of an evanescent youth, even when she appeared terribly thin, her features hollowed out by her long battle against illness, on the fringe between courage and hypochondriacal phobia. From her early days as a yéyé idol, she chronicled the passage of time, the risks of existence and the permanence of life. Her elusive, airy voice toucher on her melancholy, her attachment to “black bile,” one of the four moods defined by the doctors of yesteryear, the one that drove people to sadness. “I love nothing so much as the wound protected by the wall of its appearances,” wrote Hardy, an exceptional lyricist, in Clair-obscur (2000).

The white-haired lady, who her friend and former lover Jean-Marie Périer had photographed in a white jacket and blouse for a tribute book published in 2011, was, as he remarked then, the same slim, graceful creature he had first met in Paris, in 1962, “at her home, rue d’Aumale. It was her mother who opened the door. Behind it was this apparition that never left me.” Nothing since had thickened the lanky teenager of “Tous les garçons et les filles”, raised in Paris by a single mother. Stricken with lymphoma, then cancer of the larynx, and prone to repeated falls and fractures for several years, Hardy bowed out for the last time on June 11, 2024. It was her son, Thomas Dutronc, who broke the news on Instagram. His post simply read, “maman is gone”. Françoise Hardy was 80 years old.

She was born in Paris on January 17, 1944. She was a Capricorn, the sign of the cold planet of Saturn – the lead of alchemists. These are all things that mattered to her: Hardy fell in love with astrology in the 1970s. She wrote several books on this subject, and held regular radio broadcasts on RMC. She spent a lot of time calculating the balance of days and nights, pondering the virtues of equinoxes and solstices, conforming to her nature: “I simply have the isolation of the introvert, she told Le Monde in 1996. “Sergio Leone, comparing his work with that of John Ford, said: ‘In his films, you open the windows. In mine, you close the door, and if you open it, you risk taking a bullet between the eyes.’ I’ve always lived in the torments of the passion I’ve created for myself. Being a misanthrope, when I get attached to someone, it takes on enormous importance. When I was a child, I had inordinate feelings for my mother. I’m amazed to have experienced such violence, for so long, and still be alive.”

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