Word: piaf
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...ship is sinking," Jean Cocteau mourned last week when he was told of Edith Piaf's death. It was a typically melodramatic lament for the waning of a French world that began with cubism and ended, more or less, with existentialism. Several hours later, Cocteau himself died of a heart attack at the age of 74. In one day France had lost both an esthetic arbiter of its intellect and a guardian-or at least a mascot -of its heart...
Singing to Live. Hollow-cheeked and not quite five feet tall, Edith Piaf looked the part. She was born in wretchedness and squalor in a Paris working-class district, was abandoned by her mother, and lived in a brothel run by her grandmother. A childhood disease blinded her for four years, and at 16 she gave birth to an illegitimate daughter, who died in infancy. Heartbroken, she began singing outside sidewalk cafés, lived on the coins tossed at her feet...
...owner heard and hired her. He dressed his tiny discovery in a simple black dress and changed her name from Gassion to Piaf-argot for "little sparrow." The scrawny singer with the hoarse, throbbing voice that seemed far too powerful for so small a source was an instant success. Soon all France was listening to her tender, shamelessly sentimental songs...
...plot-a bit of fiction about a famous American singer who comes to London to perform at the Palladium and, concurrently, to rekindle an old flame and win back an abandoned child. To other viewers, it may explain why Judy Garland at 39 looked like a puffed-up Edith Piaf even though today, at 40, she looks like a million. Merciless photography highlights the bags under the eyes and the wringing hands that are the stigmata of Judy in distress. And Costume Designer Edith Head has not helped by giving her a red chiffon outfit that makes Garland look like...
Married. Edith Piaf, 47, thimble-sized (4 ft. 10 in.) French songbird, frequently in and out of the hospital; and tousled Theo Sarapo (real name: Theophrasis Lambourskis), 23. a former hairdresser now her singing protege, in a ceremony that verged on riot when 2.000 frenzied fans tried to break through police lines for a ringside view; she for the second time; in Paris...