You'd think she was born in Saint Germain des Prés, not at all ... Juliette Gréco was born on 7 February 1927 in Montpellier. And that's not her only attachment to the South of France. She gave her last concert in Saint Estève in the Pyrénées-Orientales.
Her parents were separated, her maternal grandparents brought her up in Bordeaux with her elder sister Charlotte.
Their mother joined them in 1933 and took them both to Paris. Passionate about dance, Juliette, in 1939, is a little rat at the Opéra Garnier. With the outbreak of war, the family returned to the south-west, the girls attending the Institut Royal d'éducation Sainte-Jeanne-d'Arc (Dames noires) in Montauban.
It was there that her mother joined the Resistance and she was arrested in 1943.
The two sisters returned to Paris but were captured and imprisoned at the Fresnes prison, as Charlotte had to hand over documents to the Resistance.
Juliette was not deported because of her young age, unlike her mother and older sister Charlotte, who were sent to Ravensbrück.
They did not return from deportation until 1945, after the liberation of the camp by the Red Army.
Juliette is liberated from Fresnes and will be taken in by the actress Hélène Duc, a friend of her mother's.
It was at this time that she discovered Saint-Germain des Prés, theatre and song. She met Boris Vian, Jean-Paul Sartre, Miles Davis, Joseph Kosma, Albert Camus, Darryl F. Zanuck and Sacha Distel.
In 1951, she received the SACEM prize and went on tour in Brazil and the United States. In 1954, she sang at the Olympia.
She met the actor Philippe Lemaire on the set of the film "Quand tu liras cette lettre" by Jean-Pierre Melville and married him on June 25th 1953. They divorced in 1956 after the birth of their daughter Laurence-Marie.
Cinema and songs occupy his life
In 1965, she played a leading role in the television soap opera Belphégor or the Phantom of the Louvre.
In the 1970s she toured abroad, Italy, Germany, Canada and Japan.
She was married to Michel Piccoli from 1966 to 1977, and supported François Mitterrand in the presidential election of 1974.
She was made Knight of the Legion of Honour by Prime Minister Laurent Fabius on October 23, 1984.
Her "Merci" farewell tour, which included several dozen dates, was previewed in Athens (Greece) on 1 March 2015, but officially began on 24 April 2015 at the Printemps de Bourges festival. Tel Aviv, Canada, Italy, Belgium, the Fête de l'Humanité, Amsterdam, Germany, Tours, Limoges, Lons-le-Saunier and Caen will follow...
In December 2015, she performed at some of the major Parisian venues such as Le Châtelet, the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées and La Cigale.
On 24 March 2016, she suffered a stroke in a hotel in the centre of Lyon, where she stopped off for a concert in Sausheim the following day.
As the months went by, she gradually cancelled all the remaining dates of her tour.
Juliette Gréco's last concert took place on 12 March 2016 at the Théâtre de l'Étang in Saint-Estève in the Pyrénées-Orientales region of France.
Her husband Gérard Jouannest, with whom she had been married for thirty years, died on 16 May 2018.
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