Françoise Hardy, who has died at the age of 80, was one of postwar France’s most celebrated singer-songwriters. Not only was she a peerless musician, whose career stretched from the early 1960s until 2018, but she acted, saw herself celebrated on both sides of the Channel (and beyond) as a fashion icon, and ensured that she was the living embodiment of a kind of Gallic chic that the more unsavoury likes of Serge Gainsbourg could only look at with envy, as they puffed their umpteenth Gauloises of the day. Hardy was a unique figure, and the sadness that has greeted her death from laryngeal cancer is testament to her influence on countless artists and writers.
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