(Paris) Bewitching voice, androgynous physique, icon of Parisian nightlife returned to favor in 2001 with like a boomerang in duet with Étienne Daho, the French singer Dani died at the age of 77.
Posted at 6:39
Dani – also an actress and model, among others – died on Monday evening of “following an illness” in the Tours region where she lived, her manager Lambert Boudier told AFP on Tuesday.
The artist had just finished touring his latest album Golden Horizons and was already finishing the preparation of a new album.
Dani (Danièle Graule at civil status) had chosen to call this next album Attention Departure. “Like a premonition. I only saw a new chapter in it, ”wrote in his tribute on Instagram Étienne Daho, who says he spoke to him on Monday evening.
“You the unclassifiable, free, so young […] you have done everything with the elegance of dilettantes”, greets the singer again. Before concluding “If rock, but you for real”.
“She’s a real character, she has a real depth, there is no affection at home, she doesn’t play a role, there is a real desire to sculpt an artist’s trajectory”, described to AFP in 2020 Bertrand Dicale, specialist in French song.
“Chaotic” path
Even if, as Dani told AFP two years ago in his voice with delicate roughness: “it’s not always easy to take paths like no other”. “It’s very chaotic, but with great encounters”.
Dani was the queen of “Paris by night” in the 70s, at the helm of L’Aventure, a trendy nightclub, the French version of Studio 54 in New York. His straitjacketed lifestyle was summed up in his song Life at 25 (There’s no harm in doing good).
François Truffaut chooses her for the role of Liliane in The American night, mise en abyme on the world of cinema, Oscar 1974 for best foreign film. She also toured with Roger Vadim, Claude Chabrol, Georges Lautner and even recently Olivier Marchal.
But his course was bumpy. In 1987, the former yéyé muse had told of her descent into hell in Drug the galley.
Shunned by record companies because of her frequentation of artificial paradises, she therefore returned to the front of the stage thanks to Étienne Daho in 2001.
The latter had offered to sing in a duet like a boomeranga title composed for her by Serge Gainsbourg, but rejected for Eurovision 1975 – because it was deemed too sexually connoted – and forgotten.
“Total unconsciousness”
like a boomerang was a great success. However, she didn’t believe it at first.
“Étienne Daho told me ‘If you want to get out of it, you have to sing again’. I had answered him “are you sick or what?” (laughs)”. Since then, she had regained an iconic status, which embarrassed her.
“There is a fixed side when I feel like I am in motion”, she confided to AFP in 2020. She preferred to speak of an “atypical career” – model, singer, actress, magazine leader, florist…
PHOTO CHRISTOPHE ARCHAMBAULT, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE ARCHIVES
Daniel, in 2020.
“Was I chosen or did I choose? Who knows ! asked Dani in his autobiography The night does not last.
It all started for her when she left Perpignan for Paris in 1963, at the age of 19.
“When I started, I was completely unconscious. Hoping to pose for fashion shots, I knocked on the door of French daysthe only magazine we read in Perpignan with She “, she confided to AFP in 2016.
The following week, she was on the cover. She will pose during her career in front of the lenses of Helmut Newton or Jean-Baptiste Mondino.