Dith Piaf

Edith Piaf was one of the most greatly loved singers of the twentieth century. From the start of her exceptional career in the 1930s, her waif-like form and heart-wrenching voice endeared her first to the French, then to audiences around the globe. As she moved from her youth singing in the streets to the glamour of the Paris music-halls, Piaf formed lasting friendships with such figures as Maurice Chevalier, Jean Cocteau and Marlene Dietrich; she wrote many of her own songs, aided the Resistance in the Second World War, and mentored younger singers like Yves Montand and Charles Aznavour. Yet her path to stardom was full of tragedies - the death of her daughter in infancy; the death of Marcel Cerdan, her greatest love, in a plane crash; her many illnesses, affairs and addictions, all of which nourished her passionate performances and strengthened her enduring bond with audiences. In this mesmerising, definitive new biography Carolyn Burke gives us Piaf in her own time and place, illuminating through sympathetic readings of sources hitherto unavailable both the charm and the pathos of the 'Little Sparrow' who enchanted generations and still enthralls us today.

The world-famous French singer Édith Piaf (1915-63) was never just a singer. This book suggests new ways of understanding her, her myth and her meanings over time at home and abroad, by proposing the notion of an ‘imagined’ Piaf.

Miles Hordern sailed alone in a 28-foot sloop across the Southern Ocean from New Zealand to Patagonia and back - a voyage of 13,000 nautical miles across the largest stretch of water on earth and a region of icebergs, gales and high seas. Six weeks later he made landfall on the coast of Chile and, after a chance meeting, embarked on a 1000-mile cruise southwards to survey channels and fjords in Patagonia, one of the last uncharted areas in the world. From Chile he sailed north on the Humboldt current, then west through the tropics on the return passage to New Zealand, arriving home some 18 months after he had left.

(Piano Vocal). Piano/vocal arrangment of the favorite French ballad made famous by the "Little Sparrow," Edith Piaf.

The legend that emerged from a journalist's imagination, and maintained by Piaf, gave birth to it on 19 December 1915 in Paris, at 72, rue de Belleville, in the 20th arrondissement, according to the plaque affixed to the house located at that address. Some sources even say that she was born "on the steps" of the front door of the building, on the pilgrimage of a police officer who took the baby out of her mother's womb. However, according to her birth certificate at the Paris Registry Office, Édith Giovanna Gassion was born at 4, rue de la Chine, the address of Tenon Hospital, which is indeed one of the health establishments closest to rue de Belleville. Born into poverty, Edith Piaf is a child of the ball whose parents had been in the entertainment business for two generations.

The world-famous French singer Édith Piaf (1915-63) was never just a singer. This book suggests new ways of understanding her, her myth and her meanings over time at home and abroad, by proposing the notion of an ‘imagined’ Piaf.

From the streets of Paris to worldwide fame Edith Gassion (known to all as 'Piaf', the sparrow) continues to be remembered and revered for her exceptional voice and extraordinary, troubled life. In this new version of Piaf, Pam Gems has reworked her classic 1978 play, vividly capturing the glamour and squalor, the rise and fall of this complex, fragile and enigmatic performer.