(7 February 1927 - 23 September 2020)
The French singer and actress Juliette Gréco, who has died aged 93, was born to a Corsican father and a French mother, but her grandparents looked after her and her sister Charlotte until their mother returned during World War II. They were all arrested by the Nazis and jailed, but still survived. Before the war, Juliette was briefly a ballerina, but afterwards the two sisters met the writers Camus, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Boris Vian. So, Gréco performed songs by Sartre, Jacques Prévert and Joseph Kosma, quickly becoming the muse of Existentialism. When the trumpeter Miles Davis came to Paris they had an affair and Gréco wanted to marry him, but he wouldn’t agree. Gréco had made a few French films in the 1950s, including Cocteau’s Orphée, Melville’s When You Read This Letter, Saluti e Baci with Louis Armstrong, Boum sur Paris with Edith Piaf, and Renoir’s Elena et les hommes with Ingrid Bergman. However, it was producer Darryl F. Zanuck who found her for the US cinema and with whom she had a long relationship. He cast her in The Sun Also Rises with Tyrone Power, The Naked Earth with Richard Todd, The Roots of Heaven with Errol Flynn, Crack in the Mirror with Orson Welles and The Big Gamble with Stephen Boyd. She made more films in France but still carried on touring with her singing. She was in a French TV show, Belphegor, and her later film work included The Night of the Generals with Peter O’Toole, Jacques Brel’s Far West and Jedermanns Fest with Klaus Maria Brandauer, her last film (in 2002). Gréco divorced her first husband, the actor Philippe Lemaire, who died in 1977. She also divorced her second husband, the actor Michel Piccoli, who died in May 2020. Her third husband was the pianist Gérard Jouannest who died in 2018. Juliette Gréco had a daughter, the actress and writer Laurence-Lemaire, who died, in 2016, after several years of fighting cancer, aged 62. Among her French government awards Gréco was Commander of the Lḗgion d’Honneur.
MICHAEL DARVELL
