"When I was a young girl, Juliette Gréco was my absolute idol … That long black hair, like some curtain at the entrance to a fortune teller’s tent, is a national symbol of hipness, resistance, sensuality and mystery … She’s my role model for life. If I want to be anybody, I want to be Juliette Gréco."
Born 99 years ago today: ultimate black-clad, throaty-voiced, morbidly beautiful French beatnik chanteuse, actress, eyeliner role model, proto-goth and Morticia Addams lookalike Juliette Gréco (7 February 1927 - 23 September 2020). “The French actress, Juliette Gréco, who used to sing in Existentialist cafes and still has the appearance of somebody not entirely reconciled to soap” is how the New York Times summarized her in 1958 (yikes!). More happily, a 1960 profile in Life magazine anointed Gréco the “soul of post-war Paris.” With her low, sensual voice saturated in vin rouge and Gauloises smoke and stark, gloomy image (“You moonbathe while others sunbathe,” Pablo Picasso famously exclaimed regarding her consumptive nightclub pallor), Gréco would exert an influence on later artists like Nico, Marianne Faithfull and Marc Almond. I was privileged to see Gréco perform in London twice: at The Barbican in 2000 and the Royal Festival Hall in 2011. Face powdered chalk-white, sheathed in a long black funeral shroud with batwing sleeves, she was mesmerizing! (Her furious, fist-shaking version of Jacques Brel’s “Ne Me Quitte Pas” was particularly devastating). Why not remember Gréco’s artistry by cranking up her signature tunes like “Les Amours Perdues”, “La Javanaise”, “Sous le ciel de Paris” or “Les Feuilles Mortes”? Pictured: young Greco captured backstage at the Bobino music hall in Paris in November 1951.
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