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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.
Tom Layward, the narrator and main character of Ben Markovits’ new novel, The Rest of Our Lives, introduces himself in a curious way: On the very first page of the book, he talks, matter-of-factly, about the affair his wife, Amy, had 12 years ago, when their two kids were young.
Amy, who’s Jewish, got involved at a local synagogue in Westchester; Tom, who was raised Catholic and is clearly not a joiner, remained on the sidelines. At the synagogue, Amy met Zach Zirsky, who Tom describes as “the kind of guy who danced with all the old ladies and little pigtailed girls at a bar mitzvah, so he could also put his arm around the pretty mothers and nobody would complain.”
After the affair came out, Tom and Amy decided to stay together for the kids: a boy named Michael and his younger sister, Miriam. But, Tom tells us “I also made a deal with myself. When Miriam goes to college you can leave, too.” The deal, Tom says, “helped me get through the first few months … [when] we had to pretend that everything was fine.”
Twelve years have since passed and the marriage has settled back into a state of OK-ness. Miriam, now 18, is starting college in Pittsburgh and because Amy is having a tough time with Miriam’s departure, Tom alone drives her to campus.
And, once Tom drops Miriam off, he just keeps driving, westward; without explanation to us or to himself; as though he’s a passenger in a driverless car that has decided to carry him across “the mighty Allegheny” and keep on going.
The three-page scene where Tom passively melds into the trans-continental traffic flow constitutes a master class on how to write about a character who is opaque to himself. “[Y]ou don’t feel anything about anything,” Amy says early on to Tom — an accusation that’s pretty much echoed by Tom’s old college girlfriend, Jill, whom he spontaneously drops in on at her home in Las Vegas, after being out of touch for roughly 30 years.
But, if Tom is distanced from his own feelings (and vague about the “issue” he had “with a couple of students” that forced him to take a leave from teaching in law school), he’s a sharp diagnostician of other people’s behavior. What fuels this road trip is Tom’s voice — by turns, wry, mournful and, oh-so-casually, astute.
There’s a strain of Richard Ford and John Updike in Tom’s tone, which I mean as a high compliment. Take, for instance, how Tom chats to us readers about a married couple who are old friends of his and Amy’s:
[Chrissie] was maybe one of those women who derives secret energy from the troubles of her friends. Her husband, Dick, was a perfectly good guy, about six-two, fat and healthy. He worked for an online tech platform. I really don’t know what he did.
So might most of us be summed up for posterity.
As Tom racks up miles, taking detours to visit other folks out of his past, like his semi-estranged brother, his meandering road trip accrues in suspense. There’s something else he’s subconsciously speeding away from here besides his marriage. Tom tells us at the outset that he’s suffering from symptoms his doctors ascribe to long COVID: dizziness and morning face swelling so severe that daughter Miriam jokingly calls him “Puff Daddy.” Shortly after he reaches the Pacific, Tom also lands in the hospital. “Getting out of the hospital,” Tom dryly comments, “is like escaping a casino, they don’t make it easy for you.”
The canon of road trip stories in American literature is vast, even more so if you count other modes of transportation besides cars — like, say, rafts. But, the most memorable road trips, like The Rest of Our Lives, notice the easy-to-miss signposts — marking life forks in the road and looming mortality — that make the journey itself everything.
The water bubbles up hot from the earth and sunlight filters down through the branches of mighty oaks.
But before you can soak in Santa Barbara County’s highly popular Montecito Hot Springs, you’ll need to hike a little over a mile uphill, threading your way among boulders, oaks and a meandering creek. And before the hike, there are two other crucial steps: getting to the trailhead and knowing what to expect.
The trail to Montecito Hot Springs.
These rustic spring pools are about 95 miles northwest of L.A. City Hall, just upslope from well-to-do Montecito, whose residents include Oprah Winfrey, Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle, and Gwyneth Paltrow.
Though the trail and hot springs are part of Los Padres National Forest, the trailhead is in a residential neighborhood of gated mansions. Beyond the trailhead parking area (which has room for eight or nine cars), the neighborhood includes very little curbside parking. After visitation surged during the pandemic, some neighbors were accused by county officials of placing boulders to obstruct public parking. Parking options were reduced further when county officials added parking restrictions earlier this year.
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Bottom line: Unless you can arrive on a weekday between 8 and 10 a.m., you’re probably better off taking a rideshare service to get there. Whenever you arrive, you’re likely to have company. And you might want to wait until the landscape dries out a bit from the rains of recent weeks.
As Los Padres National Forest spokesman Andrew Madsen warned, “the foothills of Santa Barbara are especially fragile and hiking is especially precarious in the aftermath of heavy rains.”
All that said, the hike is rewarding and free. From the Hot Springs Canyon trailhead at East Mountain Drive and Riven Rock Road, it’s a 2.5-mile out-and-back trail to the hot springs, with about 800 feet of altitude gain on the way.
Arriving at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday, I got the last parking spot at the trailhead, stepped past the signs forbidding parking before 8 a.m. or after sunset, then stepped past another sign warning that “this is a challenging and rugged hike.” Also, there are no bathrooms or trash cans on the trail or at the springs.
“It’s important that people know what’s going on up there before they show up,” said Madsen. “It’s not all that glamorous.”
Even though it’s only 1.2 or 1.3 miles to the hot springs, plan on about an hour of uphill hiking. Once you’re above the residential lots, you’ll see pipes along the way, carrying water down the hill, along with occasional trailside poison oak. As you near the pools, you’ll pick up the scent of sulfur and notice the water turning a strange bluish hue. Then the trail jumps across the creek — which I initially missed.
But there was a silver lining. That detour gave me a chance to admire the stone ruins of a hotel that was built next to the springs in 1870s. After a fire, it became a private club. Then it burned in the Coyote fire of 1964, which blackened more than 65,000 acres, destroyed more than 90 homes and killed a firefighter. The hot springs and surrounding land have been part of Los Padres National Forest since 2013.
Hikers look west from the ruins near Montecito Hot Springs.
(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)
On a clear day with the sun in the right place, you can stand among the overgrown ruins, look west and see the ocean, a few old oil platforms and the long, low silhouette of Santa Cruz Island. This is what the native Chumash would have seen (minus the oil platforms) through the many years they used the springs before European immigrants arrived.
Pleasant as that view was, I was ready to soak, as were the two couples who got momentarily lost with me. (We were all Montecito Hot Springs rookies.) Once we’d retraced our steps to the creek and crossed it, the trail took us quickly past a hand-lettered CLOTHING OPTIONAL sign to a series of spring-fed pools of varying temperatures.
A dozen people were already lazing in and around the uppermost pools (one woman topless, one man bottomless), but several pools remained empty. I took one that was about 2 feet deep and perhaps 90 degrees. In one pool near me sat Ryan Binter, 30, and Kyra Rubinstein, 26, both from Wichita, Kan.
Hikers Ryan Binter and Kyra Rubinstein, visiting from Wichita, Kan., soak at Montecito Hot Springs.
(Christopher Reynolds / Los Angeles Times)
“She found this,” said Binter, praising Rubinstein’s internet search savvy.
At the next pool were Emanuel Leon, 20, of Carpinteria, Calif., and Evelyn Torres, 19, of Santa Barbara. The last time they’d tried this hike, they’d strayed off-track and missed the hot springs, so this time, they were savoring the scene.
“Revenge!” said Leon, settling in.
The soaking was so mellow, quiet and unhurried that I was surprised to learn that the pools were not erected legally. As Madsen of the Los Padres National Forest explained later by phone, they were “created by the trail gnomes” — hikers arranging rocks themselves to adjust water flow and temperature, with no government entities involved.
Legal or not, they made a nice reward after the hike uphill. The downhill hike out was easier and quicker, of course, but still tricky because of the rocks and twisting trail.
On your way out of Montecito, especially if it’s your first time, take a good look at the adobe-style grandeur of the Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Catholic Church building, which looks like it was smuggled into California from Santa Fe. For food and drink, head to Coast Village Road (the community’s main drag) or the Montecito Village Shopping Center on East Valley Road. Those shops and restaurants may not match the wonder and comfort of a natural bath in the woods, but for civilization, they’re not bad.
The French government confirmed this week that it has granted citizenship to George and Amal Clooney — pictured on a London red carpet in October — and their 7-year-old twins.
Henry Nicholls/AFP via Getty Images
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Henry Nicholls/AFP via Getty Images
One of Hollywood’s most recognizable stars is now officially a French citizen.
A French government bulletin published last weekend confirms that the country has granted citizenship to George Clooney, along with his wife, human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, and their 7-year-old twins.
The Clooneys — who hail from Lexington, Ky. and Beirut, Lebanon, respectively — bought an 18th-century estate in Provence, France in 2021. In an Esquire interview this October, the Oscar-winning actor and filmmaker described the French “farm” as their primary residence, a decision he said was made with their kids in mind.
“I was worried about raising our kids in LA, in the culture of Hollywood,” Clooney said. “I felt like they were never going to get a fair shake at life. France — they kind of don’t give a s*** about fame. I don’t want them to be walking around worried about paparazzi. I don’t want them being compared to somebody else’s famous kids.”
In another interview on his recent Jay Kelly press tour, Clooney mentioned that his wife and kids speak perfect French, joking that they use it to insult him to his face while he still struggles to learn the language.
This week, after a French official raised questions of fairness, France’s Foreign Ministry explained that the Clooneys were eligible under a law that permits citizenship for foreign nationals who contribute to the country’s international influence and cultural outreach, The Associated Press reports.
The French government specifically cited the actor’s clout as a global movie star and the lawyer’s work with academic institutions and international organizations in France.
“They maintain strong personal, professional and family ties with our country,” the ministry added, per the AP. “Like many French citizens, we are delighted to welcome Georges and Amal Clooney into the national community.”
They aren’t the only ones celebrating. President Trump, who has a history of trading barbs with Clooney, welcomed the news by taking another dig at the actor.
In a New Year’s Eve Truth Social post, Trump called the couple “two of the worst political prognosticators of all time” and slammed Clooney for throwing his support behind then-Vice President Kamala Harris during the 2024 election.
“Clooney got more publicity for politics than he did for his very few, and totally mediocre, movies,” wrote Trump, who himself has made cameos in several films over the years. “He wasn’t a movie star at all, he was just an average guy who complained, constantly, about common sense in politics. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
Clooney responded the next day via a statement shared with outlets including Deadline and Variety.
“I totally agree with the current president,” Clooney said, before referencing the midterm elections later this year. “We have to make America great again. We’ll start in November.”
Clooney and Trump — once friendly — have long criticized each other
Clooney, a longtime activist and Democratic Party donor, has remained active in U.S. politics despite his overseas move.
In July 2024, he rocked the political establishment by publishing a New York Times op-ed urging then-President Joe Biden — for whom he had prominently fundraised just weeks prior — to drop his reelection bid to make way for another Democrat with better chances of taking the White House. A growing chorus of calls led to Biden’s withdrawal from the race by the end of that month.
In a December interview with NPR’s Fresh Air, Clooney said his decision to speak out on that and other issues generally comes down to “when I feel like no one else is gonna do it.”
“You’ll lose all of your clout if you fight every fight,” he added. “You have to pick the ones that you know well, that you’re well informed on, and that you have some say and you hope that that has at least some effect.”
Clooney has been a vocal critic of Trump throughout both of his terms, most recently on the topic of press freedoms during the actor’s Broadway portrayal of the late journalist Edward R. Murrow last spring.
And Trump has been similarly outspoken in his dislike of Clooney, including in an insult-laden Truth Social post — calling him a “fake movie actor” — after the publication of his New York Times op-ed.
In December, just days before this latest dust-up, Clooney shared in a Variety interview that he and Trump had been on good terms during the president’s reality television days. He said Trump used to call him often and once tried to help him get into a hospital to see a back surgeon.
“He’s a big goofball. Well, he was,” Clooney added. “That all changed.”
In the same Variety interview, Clooney — the son of longtime television anchor Nick Clooney — slammed CBS and ABC for abandoning their journalistic duty by paying to settle lawsuits with the Trump administration. He expressed concern about the current media landscape, particularly the direction of CBS News under its controversial new editor in chief, Bari Weiss.
Weiss responded by inviting Clooney to visit the CBS Broadcast Center to learn more about their work, in a written statement published in the New York Post on Tuesday. It began with “Bonjour, Mr. Clooney,” in a nod to the actor’s new milestone.
Clooney told NPR last month that he will continue to stand up for what he believes in, even if it means people who disagree with him decide not to see his movies.
“I don’t give up my right to freedom of speech because I have a Screen Actors Guild card,” he added. “The minute that I’m asked to just straight-up lie, then I’ve lost.”
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