In 1988, Florent Pagny, star of the show 300 choirs: Your 25 favorite great lyric tunes this Friday, May 6, 2022, on France 3, met Vanessa Paradis for the first time while she was in the middle of filming the film White Wedding. He was 27, she was 16. At the time, the singer had quickly improvised himself as Vanessa’s guardian angel, who was very embarrassed by the many nude scenes that director Jean-Claude Brisseau imposed on her. Neither one nor two, Florent Pagny had not hesitated to come to the aid of his beautiful by going to solve the problem himself with the director. They then began a beautiful love story, scandalous for many because of their great age difference.
Interviewed in the documentary Florent Pagny, a naked voice broadcast on France 3 in 2018, the performer of the title My freedom of thought had confided to having been embarrassed by a very disturbing detail when he went out with the singer. “Walking around with Vanessa was crazy, he remembered. She zapped everyone. She was coming somewhere, you were the luggage carrier, you weren’t even the guy. It was just her beaming. So you learn that, well, you can also be a star but depending on who you are with, you disappear. And she had this ability to make the people around her disappear.“
This famous man behind their breakup
Having sometimes the impression of being transparent next to Vanessa Paradis, he accommodated himself perfectly and was even very proud of his companion. “I never had a super big ego, I have a normal ego. If all of a sudden I go down the drain, it doesn’t matter. Anyway we lived together so afterwards, I took over the controls at home“, he had thus confided. In 1991, the couple separated following a professional proposal that Vanessa Paradis could not refuse. Lenny Kravitz asked him to join her in the United States in order to create his next album.
After their separation, the aura of Vanessa Paradis was intact with the entourage of Florent Pagny. “It wasn’t just a story that ended… The most disturbing thing is to see that my friends had rather chosen to follow it than to stay with me. That was almost what bothered me“, he revealed, adding that he had however only kept good memories with the artist.
Since then, the singer – who announced that he was suffering from lung cancer in January 2022 – has found love again and married Azucena Caamaño with whom he had two children: Inca (born in 1996) and Aël (born in 1999).