Lifestyle
Françoise Hardy, French pop star and fashion icon, dies at 80
Françoise Hardy, the French chanson singer, songwriter, fashion “It Girl” and darling of the 1960s “yé-yé” French pop movement, has died. She was 80.
Her death was announced Tuesday on Instagram by her son, Thomas Dutronc, who wrote, “Maman est partie” — “Mom is gone” in French — without specifying when or where she died. Hardy said in 2004 that she’d been diagnosed with lymphoma.
A superstar in Paris by the time she turned 20, Hardy released her debut single, “Tous les Garçons et les Filles” (“All the Boys and Girls”), in 1962. Across the following decades, she issued more than 30 studio albums, a body of work that was briefly interrupted by a late 1980s retirement.
Though hardly a household name in America — she sang most of her hits in her native tongue — Hardy was a phenomenon in her homeland, regarded both for her minor-key lyricism and her delicate delivery. She followed her first hit with “Le Temps de L’amour” (“The Time of Love”), which featured spacious, echoed production that captured the spirit of Gene Pitney’s sessions with Phil Spector. Songs including “La Maison Où J’ai Grandi” (“The House Where I Grew Up”) and “Comment te Dire Adieu” (“How to Say Goodbye to You”) pondered the absence of love and, once present, the futility of keeping it.
Director Roger Vadim, left, and stars Françoise Hardy and Jean Claude Brialy attend the premiere of “Château en Suède” (“Castle in Sweden”) in Paris on Nov. 19, 1963.
(Max Micol / Associated Press)
“In music, I like above all the slow, sad melodies, that stir the knife in the wound. Not in a way that plunges, but in a way that uplifts,” Hardy said, according to Frédéric Quinonero’s 2017 biography. “I still aspire to find the heartbreaking melody that will bring tears to my eyes. A melody whose quality gives it a sacred dimension.”
Often dismissed as an artist at the time due to her gender and beauty — a 1967 Reuters article identified her as “France’s sexy long-haired, mini-skirted singing idol” — Hardy drew on her skills as a writer and interpreter to render moot such simplistic descriptions. Her looks and charisma, however, did draw the attention of musicians such as Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones and the French singer Jacques Dutronc.
Many baby boomer music fans, in fact, learned of Hardy not through song but by reading a Dylan poem on the back of his 1964 album, “Another Side of Bob Dylan,” where the seemingly smitten Minnesota bard wrote (in lowercase), “for françoise hardy / at the seine’s edge / a giant shadow / of notre dame / seeks t’ grab my foot / sorbonne students / whirl by on thin bicycles…”
Hardy harnessed her early-1960s singing and songwriting success to become a renowned fashion icon, astrologer and published author. She also appeared in several films, including “Château en Suède” (1963), “What’s New Pussycat?” (1965) and “Grand Prix” (1966). As the decades progressed, her muse pushed her away from the commercially driven yé-yé sound toward pop-focused psychedelia, folk-rock and meditative adult pop.
“From when she was 18, she knew she was different,” producer Erick Benzi, who collaborated with Hardy for two decades, told Uncut in 2018. “She was capable of going in front of big artists like Charles Aznavour and saying, ‘Your song is crap, I don’t want to sing it.’ She never made compromises.”
Françoise Hardy strolls through a garden in London in 1968.
(Harris / Associated Press)
Born Jan. 17, 1944, during an air raid amid the final months of Germany’s occupation of France during World War II, Hardy was conceived through an affair between her mother and a much older, well-to-do married man. Her only sibling, sister Michele, arrived a year later.
Despite excelling at school and having a father from a higher social status, Hardy faced an adulthood similar to those of her middle-class peers. At one point as a teen, she recalled in her 2008 memoir, “The Despair of Monkeys and Other Trifles” (published in the U.S. in 2018), “my mother and I conjured up all the realistic careers open to me: executive secretary, medical secretary, nurse, pharmacist.” She added: “In secret I was nurturing the ambition of finding an activity with some connections to the musical style I had recently fallen for.”
When she was a teenager, as a reward for academic success, Hardy’s mother and father offered her a gift of her own choosing. She wavered between a radio and a guitar before going with the latter. “I will never know why I chose a guitar because a transistor radio was all I ever wanted,” she told the Guardian. “My future life would flow out of this crucial choice because, once I had this precious instrument in my hands, I started scratching out three chords over which I sang snatches of my own melodies.”
Alongside peers including Jane Birkin, Brigitte Bardot, France Gall and Sylvie Vartan, Hardy ascended to become a yé-yé hitmaker in her native Paris, drawing the attention of jet-setting pop stars, tastemakers and fashionistas from London, New York and Tokyo. As with other yé-yé singers, Hardy’s music blended mid-1960s bubblegum pop, groovy guitar lines and France’s romantic chanson tradition to create sticky-sweet love songs.
Hardy first visited Los Angeles in 1968 to record her English-language album “En Anglais” (“In English”) — although she had appeared onscreen at the Cinerama Dome two years earlier in John Frankenheimer’s race car movie “Grand Prix” — but never seemed too concerned with stateside success. It didn’t help that she suffered from stage fright.
James Garner and Françoise Hardy chat on the set of “Grand Prix” in 1966.
(Keystone-France / Gamma-Keystone / Getty Images)
Her commanding presence drew the attention of the Paris fashion scene and she became a muse to designers such as André Courrèges, Emmanuelle Khanh and Yves Saint Laurent. Current Louis Vuitton creative director Nicolas Ghesquière called Hardy “the very essence of French style,” a trait apparent in the cover photos of Hardy’s first four albums, which were shot by fashion photographer (and then-boyfriend) Jean-Marie Périer.
“My songs had little interest compared to the Anglo-Saxon production. So I took it to heart to dress well every time I went to London or New York,” she told Vanity Fair in 2018, calling herself “above all a fashion ambassador.”
In the late 1960s, Hardy and Jacques Dutronc began a relationship that would last the rest of their lives. Their son, Thomas Dutronc, now a successful French singer, was born in 1973, and Hardy raised him as she continued to release some of her most expansive albums. The title track to ’73’s “Message Personnel” (“Personal Message”) is a gentle exploration of unrequited love and unspoken emotions lush with orchestral arrangements.
Hardy and Dutronc married in 1981 — purely for fiscal reasons, both stressed — but separated in 1988. Despite entering into other relationships, they never divorced and remained close. Her extended family life had its share of tragedy. According to Hardy’s memoir, in 1981 her father, with whom she had had little contact, was killed in his home by a male prostitute. As she also conveyed in her memoir, in the mid-2000s, her sister, who had long struggled with mental illness, died. Though the police investigation never officially confirmed the cause, Hardy believed her sister died by suicide.
Commercial success afforded Hardy the opportunity and time to fully explore her creativity; one main avenue was astrology. Introduced to the belief system in the 1960s, she immersed herself in the various schools of thought, ultimately studying with French writer Jean-Pierre Nicola. Using her fame to advocate for his methods, she eventually became the daily horoscope reader on Radio Monte Carlo. She released her astrology book “Les Rythmes du Zodiaque” (“Rhythms of the Zodiac”) in 2003.
Hardy published her first work of fiction, “L’Amour Fou” (“Crazy Love”) in 2012. Written as a companion to an album of the same name, its success kept her writing. Two books of essays followed in 2015 and 2016.
Hardy’s statements on politics drew ire from French liberals in 2012 when she stated that if Socialist Party candidate François Hollande were able to initiate his proposed 75% tax on millionaires, Hardy would “have to sell my apartment,” adding, “I’ll be on the street.”
Hardy lived long enough to see her recordings rediscovered by a new generation of listeners. She sang on a remix of the Britpop band Blur’s 1994 song “To the End,” and continued to release albums and collaborate with others for the rest of her life. In 2015, the respected archival label Light in the Attic reissued her first four albums. in 2021, Hardy and the French house group Bon Entendeur released an updated version of her early hit “Le Temps de L’amour.”
“No one can sing like Françoise,” Iggy Pop said in 1997 as he and Hardy were promoting their version of “I’ll Be Seeing You.” “Her emotional and musical accuracy combined with her sense of reserve and mystique make an indelible and very French impact on the listener. There’s no one else as good around.”
Singer Eddy Mitchell and Françoise Hardy appear together in Paris in 2008.
(Michael Sawyer / Associated Press)
“It has always been a big surprise to me that people, even very good musicians, were moved by my voice,” Hardy told the Guardian. “I know its limitations, I always have. But I have chosen carefully. What a person sings is an expression of what they are. Luckily for me, the most beautiful songs are not happy songs. The songs we remember are the sad, romantic songs.”
Hardy, who survived lymphatic cancer in the mid-2000s, was diagnosed with a malignant tumor in her ear in 2018. Later that year, she explained her situation in an email to the French magazine Femme Actuelle: “My physical suffering has already been so terrible that I am afraid that death will force me to go through even more physical suffering.”
Arguing on behalf of her right to die, she wrote: “It is not for the doctors to accede to each request, but to shorten the unnecessary suffering of an incurable disease from the moment it becomes unbearable.”
For an artist long drawn to the ways in which people cope with grief and sadness, her plight seemed aligned with the themes of her music.
“I sing about death in a very symbolic and even positive way. There is an acceptance there, too,” she told the Guardian. “At my age, I can really only sing about that one very special train that will take me out of this world. But, of course, I am also hoping that it will send me to the stars and help me discover the mystery of the cosmos.”
Hardy is survived by her husband and their son.
Lifestyle
A glimpse of Iran, through the eyes of its artists and journalists
Understanding one of the world’s oldest civilizations can’t be achieved through a single film or book. But recent works of literature, journalism, music and film by Iranians are a powerful starting point. Clockwise from top left: The Seed of the Sacred Fig, For The Sun After Long Nights, Cutting Through Rocks, It Was Just an Accident, Martyr!, and Kayhan Kalhor.
NEON; Pantheon; Gandom Films Production; NEON; Vintage; Julia Gunther for NPR
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NEON; Pantheon; Gandom Films Production; NEON; Vintage; Julia Gunther for NPR
Few Americans have had the opportunity to visit or explore Iran, an ethnically diverse nation of over 90 million people which has been effectively shut off from the United States since the Iranian revolution of 1979. Now, with a U.S. and Israeli-led war on Iran underway, the ideas, feelings and opinions of Iranians may feel less accessible. However, some recent books, films and music made by artists and journalists in Iran and from the Iranian diaspora can help illuminate this ancient culture and its contemporary politics.
These suggestions are just a starting point, of course — with an emphasis on recent works made by Iranians themselves, rather than by outsiders looking in.
Books
For the Sun After Long Nights: The Story of Iran’s Women-Led Uprising, by Fatemeh Jamalpour and Nilo Tabrizy
There are quite a few excellent titles that deconstruct the history of Iran from ancient times through the rule of the Pahlavi Dynasty to the Iranian Revolution. But there are far fewer books that help us understand the Iran of 2026 and the people who live there now. One standout is the National Book Award-nominated For the Sun After Long Nights: The Story of Iran’s Women-Led Uprising by journalists Fatemeh Jamalpour and Nilo Tabrizy, which chronicles — almost in real time — the Woman, Life, Freedom movement that began in 2022, during which Jamalpour was working secretly as a journalist in Tehran. In 2024-25, Jamalpour (who is now living in exile in the U.S.) and I spent a year together at the University of Michigan’s Knight-Wallace fellowship for journalists; her insights into contemporary Iran are among the best.
Gold, by Rumi, translated by Haleh Liza Gafori
If Americans are familiar with Persian poetry at all, it may well be through popular “translations” of the 13th-century Sufi poet Jalaluddin Rumi done by the late American poet Coleman Barks, who neither read nor spoke the Persian language and detached the works of Molana (“our master”), as Iranians call him, of references to Islam. (Instead, Barks “interpreted” preexisting English translations.)
In 2022, Iranian-American poet, performance artist and singer Haleh Liza Gafori offered the first volume of a corrective, in the form of fresh Rumi translations that are at once accessible, deeply contemplative and immediate. A second volume, Water, followed last year.
Martyr!: A Novel, by Kaveh Akbar
This 2024 debut novel by Kaveh Akbar, the poetry editor at The Nation, is an unflinching tour-de-force bursting with wit and insight into the complications of diaspora, the nature of identity in a post-War on Terror world and the inter-generational impact of the 1979 Revolution on Iranians. The protagonist, the Iran-born but American-raised Cyrus Shams, has struggled with addiction, depression and insomnia his whole life, and is trying his best to make sense of a world at the “intersection of Iranian-ness and Midwestern-ness.” As with so many other of the titles here, fiction and fact are woven together: the story centers around the true story of the U.S. downing an Iranian passenger plane in 1988 during the Iran-Iraq war.
The Stationery Shop: A Novel, by Marjan Kamali
Marjan Kamali’s 2019 love story is the wistful tale of a young woman named Roya and an idealistic activist named Bahman, who meet cute in a Tehran store in the 1950s, but whose planned marriage falls apart due to turmoil both familial and political, as Iran’s democratically elected government falls in a U.S.-British lead coup that ends with the installation of the Shah. Roya flees to the U.S. for a fresh start, but the two reunite in 2013, wondering: what if life had spun out in a different direction?
Movies
Coup 53
This 2019 documentary directed by Iranian film maker Taghi Amirani and co-written by Walter Murch recounts Operation Ajax, in which the CIA and Britain’s MI6 engineered the removal of Mohammad Mossadegh, Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, and installed a friendly ruler, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, in his place. (The Shah was ousted in the 1979 revolution.) As Fresh Air critic John Powers noted in his review, “What emerges first is the backstory of the coup, which like so much in the modern Middle East is predicated on oil. Shortly after the black gold was discovered in early 20th century Iran, a British oil company now known as BP locked up a sweetheart deal for its exploitation. Iran not only got a mere 16% of the oil money before British taxes, but the books were kept by the British — and the Iranians weren’t allowed to see them.”
YouTube
Cutting Through Rocks
Sara Khaki and Mohammadreza Eyni’s film Cutting Through Rocks is up for an Oscar this season after premiering at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. This inspiring documentary follows Sara Shahverdi — a divorced, childless motorcyclist — as she campaigns to become the first woman elected to the city council of her remote village, and who dreams of teaching girls to ride and to end child marriage.
YouTube
It Was Just an Accident
The latest film from acclaimed director Jafar Panahi — who has officially been banned from making films in Iran — is 2025’s It Was Just an Accident. Panahi, who has been jailed multiple times for his work and was recently sentenced again in absentia, has said in interviews that his inspiration for this brutal – and shockingly funny – thriller was people he met while in prison: an auto mechanic named Vahid finds himself face-to-face with the man who he is fairly certain was his torturer in jail, and eventually assembles other victims to try to confirm his suspicions. Fresh Air critic Justin Chang called It Was Just an Accident “a blast of pure anti-authoritarian rage.”
YouTube
The Seed of the Sacred Fig
This 2024 thriller — shot in secret by director Mohammad Rasoulof — centers on a family whose father, Iman, is appointed as an investigating judge in Tehran. But it soon becomes clear that his job has nothing to do with actually investigating. Iman, his wife, and two daughters come to suspect each other in our age of mass surveillance, as the city streets below erupt into the real-life Woman, Life, Freedom protests.
YouTube
Music
Kayhan Kalhor
One of the primary ambassadors of Persian classical music has been the composer and kamancheh (an Iranian bowed-instrument) virtuoso Kayhan Kalhor. Although music, like poetry, has been central to Iranian culture for centuries, all kinds of music were initially banned after the 1979 revolution. Since then, however, Iranian classical musicians have ridden many looping cycles of official condemnation, grudging tolerance, censorship and attempts at co-option by the regime.
Despite those difficulties, Kalhor has built a thriving career both inside Iran and abroad, including winning a Grammy Award as part of the Silkroad Ensemble and earning three nominations as a solo artist. Back in 2012, I invited him to our Tiny Desk to perform solo. “Didn’t know I could have goosebumps for 12 minutes straight,” a YouTube commenter recently wrote; I couldn’t put it any better.
YouTube
Saeid Shanbehzadeh
Among Iran’s 92 million people, about 40% of come from various ethnic minorities, including Azeris, Kurds and Armenians among many others. One of the most fascinating communities is the Afro-Iranians in the Iranian south, many of whose ancestors were brought to Iran as enslaved people from east Africa. Multi-instrumentalist and dancer Saeid Shanbehzadeh, who traces his ancestry to Zanzibar, celebrates that heritage with his band, and specializes in the Iranian bagpipe and percussion.
YouTube
The underground metal scene
Despite ongoing restrictions on music — including the continued ban on female singers performing in mixed-gender public settings — Iran is home to a thriving underground scene for metal and punk. Though it’s fictional, Farbod Ardebelli’s 2020 short drama Forbidden to See Us Scream in Tehran — which was secretly filmed in Tehran, with the director giving instructions remotely from the U.S. via WhatsApp — gives a flavor of that real-life scene and the dangers those artists face.
YouTube
Lifestyle
Sen. Thom Tillis Rips Kristi Noem, Compares ICE Killings To Dog She Killed
Sen. Tillis To Kristi Noem
ICE Killings Are Like Dog You Killed
Published
Fireworks on Capitol Hill … Sen. Thom Tillis ripped into DHS Secretary Kristi Noem during a congressional hearing … comparing American citizens killed by immigration agents to a dog she killed.
Check out the video … the Republican Senator from North Carolina says Noem has shown terrible leadership and decision-making as Trump‘s DHS Secretary.
AP
Tillis says the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis by ICE and Border Patrol remind him of a passage from Noem’s book … where she recalls killing a dog she brought on a hunting trip.
Noem said the 14-month-old dog, Cricket, was misbehaving … so she led the dog to a gravel pit and shot her.
X/@DHSgov
Sen. Tillis told her straight up … “Those are bad decisions made in the heat of the moment. Not unlike what happened up in Minneapolis. We’re an exceptional nation, and one of the reasons we’re exceptional is we expect exceptional leadership. And you’ve demonstrated anything but that.”
Lifestyle
For filmmaker Chloé Zhao, creative life was never linear
In 2021, Zhao made history as the first woman of color to win the best director Oscar for her film Nomadland. Her Oscar-nominated drama Hamnet has made $70 million worldwide.
Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
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Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
It took a very special kind of spirit to make Hamnet, which is nominated for best picture at this year’s Academy Awards. Chloé Zhao brought her uniquely sensitive, mind-body approach to directing the fictionalized story about how William Shakespeare was inspired to write his masterpiece Hamlet.
Zhao adapted the screenplay from a novel by Maggie O’Farrell, and for directing the film, she’s now nominated for an Oscar. She could make history by becoming the first woman to win the best director award more than once.
Zhao says she believes in ceremonies and rituals, in setting an intention, a mood, a vibration for any event. Before Hamnet premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, she led the audience in a guided meditation and a breathing exercise.

Zhao also likes to loosen up, like she did at a screening of Hamnet in Los Angeles last month, when she got the audience to get up and dance with her to a Rihanna song.
She, her cast and crew had regular dance parties during the production of Hamnet. So for our NPR photo shoot and interview at a Beverly Hills hotel, I invited her to share some music from her playlist. She chose a track she described as “drones and tones.”
Our photographer captured her in her filmy white gown, peeking contemplatively from behind the filmy white curtains of a balcony at the Waldorf Astoria.
Zhao says she believes in ceremonies and rituals, and makes them a part of her filmmaking process.
Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
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Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
Then Zhao and I sat down to talk.
“I had a dream that we were doing this interview,” I told her. “And it started with a photo shoot, and there was a glass globe –”
“No way!” she gasped.
It so happens that on the desk next to us, was a small glass globe — perhaps a paperweight.
I told her that in my dream, she was looking through the globe at some projected images. “We were having fun and it was like we didn’t want it to stop,” I said.
“Oh, well, me and the globe and the lights on the wall: they’re all part of you,” Zhao said. “They’re your inner crystal ball, your inner Chloé.”
“Inner Chloé?” I asked. “What is the inner Chloé like?”
“I don’t know, you tell me,” she said. “Humbly, from my lineage and what I studied is that everything in a dream is a part of our own psyche.”
Dreams and symbols are very much a part of Zhao’s approach to filmmaking, which she describes as a magical and communal experience. She said it’s all part of her directing style.
Chloé Zhao used painting and dance to connect with actors on the set of her latest film Hamnet.
Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
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Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
“If you’re captain of any ship, you are not just giving instructions; people are also looking to you energetically as well,” she explained. “Whether it’s calmness, it’s groundedness, it’s feeling safe: then everyone else is going to tune to you.” Zhao says it has taken many years to get to this awareness. Her own journey began 43 years ago in Beijing, where she was born. She moved to the U.S. as a teen, and studied film at New York University where Spike Lee was one of her teachers. She continued honing her craft at the Sundance Institute labs — along with her friend Ryan Coogler and other indie filmmakers.
Over the years, Zhao’s film catalogue has been eclectic — from her indie debut Songs My Brothers Taught Me, set on a Lakota Sioux reservation, to the big-budget Marvel superhero movie Eternals. She got her first best director Oscar in 2021 for the best picture winner Nomadland. Next up is a reboot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
“A creative life,” she notes, “is not a linear experience for me.”
Zhao still lingers over the making of Hamnet, a very emotional story about the death of a child. During the production, Zhao says she used somatic and tantric exercises and rituals to open and close shooting days.
She also invited her lead actors Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley to help her set the mood on set. They danced, they painted, they meditated together.
“She created an atmosphere where everybody who chose to step in to tell this story was there for a reason that was deeply within them,” actress Jessie Buckley told me.

Buckley is a leading contender for this year’s best actress Oscar. She said that to prepare for her very intense role as William Shakespeare’s wife, Zhao asked her to write down her dreams “as a kind of access point, to gently stir the waters of where I was feeling.”
Buckley sent Zhao her writings, and also music she felt was “a tone and texture of that essence.”
That kind of became the ritual of how they worked together, Buckley said. “And not just the cast were moving together, but the crew were and the camera was really creating dynamics and a collective unconscious.”
Filmmaker and Hamnet producer Steven Spielberg calls Zhao’s empathy her superpower.
Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
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Bethany Mollenkof for NPR
That was incredibly useful for creating Hamnet — a story about communal grief. Steven Spielberg, who co-produced the film, called Zhao’s empathy her superpower.
“In every glance, in every pause and every touch, in every tear, in every single moment of this film, every choice that Chloé made is evidence of her fearlessness,” Spielberg said when awarding Zhao a Directors Guild of America award. “In Hamnet, Chloé also shows us that there can be life after grief.”
Zhao says it took five years and a midlife crisis for her to develop the emotional tools she used to make Hamnet.
“I hope it could give people a two-hour little ceremony,” she told me. “And in the end, I hope that a point of contact can be made. That means that there’s a heart opening. But it will be painful, right? Because when your heart opens, you feel all the things you usually don’t feel. And then a catharsis can emerge.”
As our interview time came to a close, I told Zhao I have my own little ritual at the end of every interview; I record a few minutes of room tone, the ambient sound of the space we’re in. It’s for production purposes, to smooth out the audio.
Zhao knew just what I meant. She told me a story about her late friend Michael “Wolf” Snyder who was her sound recordist for Nomadland. “He said to me, ‘I don’t always need it, but just so you know, I am going to watch you. And when I tell that you are a little frazzled, I’m going to ask for a room tone … just to give you space.’” she recalled. “‘And if you feel like you need the silence space, you just look at me, nod. I’ll come ask for a room tone.’”
I closed our interview ceremony with that moment of silence, a moment of peace, for director Chloé Zhao.
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