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Juliette Gréco, French singer and actress who was a symbol of 1950s female liberation – obituary

Greco performing in Paris, 1968 - AFP via Getty Images
Greco performing in Paris, 1968 - AFP via Getty Images

Juliette Gréco, the singer and actress, who has died aged 93, was known in Paris as “the muse of Saint-Germain-des-Prés” and was reckoned not only an emblem of the ideas of Sartre, de Beauvoir and other Left Bank existentialist intellectuals, but also of 1950s France.

While still a teenage drama student, Juliette Gréco became a familiar figure on the Left Bank. Her daringly boyish uniform of black sweater and pedal-pushers teamed with her raven hair, dark eyes and ivory skin prompted Picasso to comment that “you moonbathe while others sunbathe”. Her personality, both fragile and fiercely independent, did not disappoint.

Having been introduced to Jean-Paul Sartre by the existentialist philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Juliette Gréco was embraced as the apotheosis of female liberation – as called for in de Beauvoir’s La Deuxième Sexe, and integral to which was sexual freedom, a doctrine she always followed.

In 1949 she was asked to make an appearance at the reopening of the Right Bank cabaret Le Boeuf sur le Toit. Sartre persuaded her to sing, arranged for the popular composer Joseph Kosma to accompany her, and picked three songs which would suit her. Although she described herself as “petrified”, she was “inoculated by the stage virus” and caused a sensation.

Sartre was the first of many influential French writers to provide lyrics for Juliette Gréco’s songs.

When asked why he and others such as Prévert, Mauriac and Camus should give their poetry to a mere chanteuse, he replied: “The writer often forgets the words have sensual beauty. Gréco’s voice reminds us. Gentle, warm and light, her voice rekindles their fire.” She referred to these songs as “my passport … my whole life”.

Greco on holiday in the 1950s - Getty
Greco on holiday in the 1950s - Getty

Juliette Gréco was born on February 7 1927 in Montpellier and began training as a dancer at the Opéra de Paris when she was nine. Her studies were cut short by the outbreak of war, and when she was 15 her mother and sister were sent to a prison camp for Resistance activities.

Juliette herself was imprisoned for a few weeks (for slapping a Gestapo officer, she claimed). On finding herself incarcerated with prostitutes, she characteristically made the most of things, using the time to learn about men.

On her release Juliette Gréco returned to Paris alone and began acting classes. Although she never claimed to be an intellectual or even an existentialist, her beauty and curiosity ensured her friendship with the philosophers, artists and writers who frequented the cafes and clubs of Saint-Germain.

After the enthusiastic response to her professional debut as a singer at Le Boeuf sur le Toit, Juliette Gréco soon moved to La Rose Rouge on the Rue de Rennes, and it was here that her reputation was made.

Wearing an austere black Balmain dress bought in a sale, she would replace the coy innuendo of the original lyrics with her own more explicit choices. One observer described her hanging on to the microphone stand “like a shipwrecked man clinging to a lifebelt”.

Juliette Greco signs records - Raoul Fornezza/AP Photo
Juliette Greco signs records - Raoul Fornezza/AP Photo

At La Rose Rouge she met Marlon Brando who, in his trademark white T-shirt, would take her home on the back of his motorcycle. Despite her later assertion that “rarely have I seen such a good-looking man”, he did not become her lover as he was pursuing the singer Eartha Kitt at the time.

Juliette Gréco’s first film was Jean Cocteau’s Orphée (1949) in which she made a memorable appearance as a leather-clad gang leader.

Her growing international reputation in the mid-1950s culminated in a short-lived Hollywood career, with well-received roles in such films as John Huston’s The Roots of Heaven (1958) and Richard Fleischer’s Crack in the Mirror (1960), both with Orson Welles.

But after ending an affair with the producer Darryl F Zanuck, she turned her back on Hollywood, preferring to concentrate on her singing career.

Of her numerous recordings, many – such as those written by Jacques Brel, Charles Trenet and Charles Aznavour – have become French standards.

Her collaboration with Serge Gainsbourg produced La Javanaise, which is now such a French institution that it is taught in schools. She carried on recording into her seventies, still keen to find young writers who would match up to those of her youth.

She also travelled widely, performing in more than a dozen countries a year, craving the “joy and terror” of being on stage. Her enduring popularity owed much to her ability to transport people back to a time when, as she put it, “we were free, and to be free is the most precious thing in life.”

Juliette Gréco had many love affairs, including one with the black American jazz trumpeter Miles Davis.

She was never intimidated by those who disapproved, once spitting into the hand of a New York maître d’ who practically refused to serve them. “In America,” she later wrote, “his colour was made blatantly obvious to me, whereas in Paris I didn’t even notice.”

Greco in Poland, 2008 - LESZEK SZYMANSKI/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
Greco in Poland, 2008 - LESZEK SZYMANSKI/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

Although in her later years Juliette Gréco lived just outside Paris, she would return frequently to the city, always staying at the Hôtel Lutétia, where she had been reunited with her mother and sister after the war. In her hotel bedroom, a stone’s throw from Saint-Germain, she would sleep with the curtains open so that she could see the Eiffel Tower.

In 1984 she was appointed to the Légion d’honneur in recognition of her status as an ambassadress of French song.

Despite her insistence that her three marriages were all undertaken merely to please her husbands, in her last marriage, in 1988, to Gérard Jouannest, a composer and pianist, Juliette Gréco appeared to have found an arrangement she desired. He died in 2018. Her previous marriages were to the actors Philippe Lemaire (1953), with whom she had a daughter, and Michel Piccoli (1966).

Juliette Gréco, born February 7 1927, died September 23 2020