Charles Aznavour obituary
Singer, songwriter and actor, best known for She, who
personified French culture to the world
Michael Freedland
Mon 1 Oct 2018 16.24 BST
The singer, songwriter and actor Charles Aznavour, who has
died aged 94, was one of France’s best-loved entertainers and its most potent
show-business export since Maurice Chevalier. Edith Piaf was one of those who
encouraged his early career, and in many ways Aznavour could be seen as the
male Piaf; his slight frame disguised a similarly huge talent. He was as
important a composer and songwriter as he was a singer – and he could be a
great actor even without singing a note on screen.
There were times in Aznavour’s career when he was as popular
outside France as he was in his own country. His recording of She, a sweet,
soulful number composed by Aznavour and Herbert Kretzmer, topped the British
charts for several weeks in 1974. Aznavour’s songs were in the great dramatic
tradition of the chanson, storytelling to music, rather than mere verse sung in
the way of the conventional pop song. Even when he performed in English, his
songs sounded as though they had first been minted in Montmartre. He was often
called the French Frank Sinatra and the comparison was apt. When he sang The
Old Fashioned Way or Yesterday When I Was Young, listeners somehow caught his
nostalgia kick and remembered those days, too.
In films, he was a character actor who was always the most
interesting figure on the screen. His lead role as a musician clashing with
criminals in François Truffaut’s 1960 drama Tirez sur le Pianiste (Shoot the
Piano Player) established him internationally.
Aznavour, however, was always self-deprecating. He would
refer people to a crumpled piece of paper on which, as a very young man, he had
written his weaknesses. They were, he said: “My voice, my height, my gestures,
my lack of culture and education, my frankness and my lack of personality.”
No one doubted his frankness, but his personality was one of
his greatest characteristics, and he seemed to personify French culture to the
English-speaking world. His height (5ft 3in) was the only thing that he could
do nothing about, but it was one of those great trademarks that help to mark
out a show-business personality – that and his gravelly voice, and the facial
features that got craggier as he got older. Aznavour recalled: “They used to
say, ‘When you are as ugly as that and when you have a voice like that, you do
not sing.’ But Piaf used to tell me, ‘You will be the greatest.’”
Aznavour’s family were Armenian and went to France in the
wake of the Turkish massacres of their people. His parents, Mischa and Knar
Aznavourian, were living in Paris at the time of their son’s birth, in a poor
part of the Latin quarter, where his father worked as a cook and his mother as
a seamstress. His father was also a part-time singer and his mother a sometime
actor, but neither made a living at what they wanted to do most.
Encouraged by them, he danced, played the violin, sang and
aspired to act. He got work as a film extra from the 1930s onwards and in 1941
joined the Jean Dasté dramatic troupe. During the second world war, having
adopted Charles Aznavour as his stage name, he joined the singer-composer
Pierre Roche in a nightclub act and gained experience writing lyrics and in
cabaret. In the postwar years they went on tour with Piaf around France and in
the US, but split up when Roche married.
Aznavour wrote songs for artists including Piaf, Gilbert
Bécaud and Juliette Gréco, and in the 1950s began to have some success in his
own right, first in France and then internationally. By the early 1960s he was
able to sell out Carnegie Hall in New York. He appeared in films such as Les
Dragueurs (Young Have No Morals, 1959) and La Tête Contre les Murs (The
Keepers, 1959). By the time he made Le Testament d’Orphée (Testament of
Orpheus, 1960), he was enough of a star to be featured in a cameo role as
himself. After his acclaimed performance in Shoot the Piano Player, he starred
in US and British films including Candy (1968) and And Then There Were None
(1974), an Agatha Christie adaptation, and in the Oscar-winning German drama
The Tin Drum (1979).
In 2002 he appeared in Atom Egoyan’s drama about the
Armenian genocide, Ararat. Aznavour retained close ties to his family’s homeland.
When an earthquake hit Armenia in 1988, killing more than 20,000 people, he
formed the charity Aznavour for Armenia and wrote Pour Toi Arménie, which he
recorded with a lineup of well-known French singers, to help support those
affected by the disaster. In 2004 he was made a National Hero of Armenia, and a
few years later an Aznavour museum was opened in the capital, Yerevan. He was
appointed Armenia’s ambassador to Unesco and in 2009 Armenian ambassador to
Switzerland.
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Across his eight-decade career, he wrote more than 1,000
songs and was said to have sold more than 180m records. He continued to record
popular albums, including Duos (2008), a collection of duets with, among
others, Elton John, Carole King, Liza Minnelli and Plácido Domingo. In 2011 he
held a month-long residency at the Olympia music hall in Paris.
Aznavour was married three times and had six children. “I
know my life is a flop,” he said once. “A flop as a father, a flop as a man.
You must make a choice: a successful life as a man, or show business. Now it is
too late even to make a choice. I belong to the public or to my pride. My only
salvation is to become a greater artist.” A legion would say he achieved that
salvation.
He is survived by his third wife, Ulla (nee Thorsel), whom
he married in 1967, and their children Katia, Mischa and Nicolas; and by Seda
and Charles, the children of his first marriage, to Micheline Rugel. A son,
Patrick, from his second marriage, to Evelyne Plessis, predeceased him.
• Charles Aznavour (Shahnour Varenagh Aznavourian), singer,
songwriter and actor, born 22 May 1924; died 1 October 2018
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