Thanks to her 1963 hit Tous les Garçons et les Filles, she sold more records in 18 months than Edith Piaf had in 18 years
Françoise Hardy, who has died aged 80, was an intoxicatingly romantic French chanteuse and heartthrob of the early Beatles era; one of the biggest "yé-yé" stars in her native land, she also enjoyed a modest string of British hits in the mid-1960s, many of them gentle and sultry ballads such as Tous les Garçons et les Filles, Et Même and All Over the World, before making a comeback 30 years later with Le Danger (1996), an album that placed her sensuous voice and mysterious French lyrics in a contemporary soft-rock setting.
She wrote most of her material herself, which in the early 1960s was unusual for any pop star, let alone a woman. No matter how jaunty her songs, they often evinced a kind of dreamy sadness. "I walk down the streets, my soul in sorrow," ran one plaintive line in Tous les Garçons.
Such wistfulness contrasted nicely with the perfectly pitched style, poise and captivating beauty that made her the French cover girl of the 1960s. It was a combination that caused a generation of male adolescents on both sides of the Channel to fall head over heels in love with her - or more precisely, as the critic Sean O'Hagan suggested in The Observer, "with the idea of her that the songs suggested".
Among the countless men who idealised her was Salvador Dalí, with whom she ate ortolans, a French delicacy, for the first and only time. David Bowie confessed to being "passionately in love with her", Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones tried and failed to seduce her, Mick Jagger described her as his ideal woman, and Bob Dylan honoured her in a poem scribbled on a record sleeve. He need not have bothered. "I had no interest in him as a man, only as an artist," she told The Daily Telegraph in 2005. "He took me to his hotel room after inviting me to a show in Paris and played me two tracks he hadn't yet released ... but he wasn't very attractive."
In her early years Françoise Hardy collaborated with Serge Gainsbourg; after her 1990s renaissance, she duetted with Damon Albarn, Iggy Pop and Julio Iglesias. She also had a fondness for the music of the Jesus and Mary Chain and Cigarettes After Sex, the cult Brooklyn band whose sound, she said, "I have been looking for all my life".
She had long since abandoned live performance, feeling that her voice and stage manner were not up to it. Her final appearances were in 1967, including one at the Savoy Hotel in London where she wore a metal dress designed by Paco Rabanne that, despite its brevity, weighed 16kg. "If I could sing like Céline Dion, it would have been different," she once said, remaining as self-critical as ever.
Françoise Madeleine Hardy was born during an air-raid in Nazi-occupied Paris on January 17 1944, the elder of two daughters of Madeleine Hardy, an accounts clerk, and her married lover, Étienne Dillard, who was largely absent during his daughter's childhood.
He did, however, insist that Françoise and her sister, Michèle, who was later diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, were educated at Institution La Bruyère, a Catholic school run by Trinitarian nuns, where the shame of being from a single-parent family created in her an acute lack of confidence that decades of fame and wealth failed to dent.
Her early stomping ground was a quartier of the ninth arrondissement known as La Trinité, with its own claim to chanson fame. Here was the parental apartment of Lucien Ginsburg, as Serge Gainsbourg was then known, and elsewhere in the quartier lived Jean-Philippe Smet (or Johnny Halliday) and Claude Moine (Eddy Mitchell of the Chaussettes Noires), both of whom Hardy remembered leading local bands of proto-rockers.
In 1959 her father reappeared to present her with a guitar as a reward for passing her baccalaureate. Inspired by Salut les Copains, a teen-oriented radio programme broadcast on Europe 1 that would become the launchpad for the Beatles-inspired French wave of "yé-yé" pop, she taught herself three chords. Soon she was using song-writing as a form of therapy, composing a series of unremittingly sad numbers.
Signed by Vogue Records in 1961, she recorded Tous les Garçons, her own composition, during "three hours with the worst four musicians in Paris". On returning from holiday in Austria the following summer she discovered that it had become a hit and by mid-1963 sales of Tous les Garçons had reached two million copies, with the French press observing that she had sold more records in 18 months than Edith Piaf did in 18 years.
Roger Vadim, the film director credited with creating Brigitte Bardot, took her under his wing, pledging to maintain her "girl next door" image, though almost immediately her long straight hair was tied up, her slacks replaced with a dress and her absence of make-up corrected. She appeared in Château en Suède (1963), his sex comedy set in a Swedish castle, and a handful of other films including John Frankenheimer's sports drama Grand Prix (1966), Frankenheimer having spotted her emerging from a London nightclub, but she never pursued a serious acting career.
Françoise Hardy represented Monaco at the 1963 Eurovision Song Contest in London, singing L'amour s'en va and coming joint fifth with the French entry. That autumn she released her second album, Le Premier Bonheur du Jour. By then she was at the front of the "yé-yé" wave (so-called to mimic the "yeah yeah" of British and American rock'n'rollers), but whereas other yé-yé girls such as Sylvie Vartan and Brigitte Bardot largely dealt in frivolity, Françoise Hardy's music retained its distinctively thoughtful, melancholic quality.
Despairing of French recording facilities, she took to working in London, where she acquired a British following. Tous les Garçons reached No 36 in the British charts in 1964 and All Over the World, her plaintive English-language single, made the Top 20 and stayed in the charts for 15 weeks, becoming possibly her best-known recording internationally.
Her other albums included Comment te dire adieu (1968), Message personnel (1973) and Clair-obscur (2000), none of which made quite the same impact on the English-speaking world. Her penultimate album L'amour fou (2012), its words half-spoken and half-sung, was conceived as the resigned and philosophical soundtrack to a novel of the same name that she published two years later.
During lulls in her musical career, some of which were prolonged, Françoise Hardy found a rewarding distraction in astrology and at one time devoted four years to the most exhaustive of her several books on the subject. She was a Capricorn, which explained her shyness, she said, because "when the sun is in Capricorn you are not there ... you are below the horizon, you are invisible".
Her final album, Personne d'autre, was released in 2018 featuring 10 original songs, including one in English, You're My Home. Many of its lyrics deal with her advancing years, coping with lymphatic cancer and facing up to her own mortality. "Time is accelerating nowhere," she sang on Un seul geste, while both Train spécial and Le large sounded like forlorn goodbyes. Nevertheless, she retained her air of slim and elegant Parisian chic.
Her memoir was translated into several languages including English, in which it was published as The Despair of Monkeys and Other Trifles (2018), the title coming from the name of a monkey puzzle tree she often visited in the Parc de Bagatelle. Its hard, sharp leaves, she said, reminded her of "men who have caused me despair".
Françoise Hardy's partner in the 1960s was the photographer Jean-Marie Périer, whose unsmiling pictures of her, hair falling over her shoulders and eyes fixed on some distant point, adorn her early record covers.
In 1981 she married Jacques Dutronc, her fellow singer-turned-actor with whom she had previously had a son, the jazz guitarist Thomas Dutronc. They lived in a spacious, split-level minimalist apartment close to the Arc de Triomph, though like her own father Dutronc was often absent, spending much of his time at their Corsican retreat, and they subsequently formally separated, though never divorced.
Dutronc and her son survive her.
Françoise Hardy, born January 17 1944, died June 11 2024
