At 70, Jean-Jacques Goldman has led a career as exceptional as he has remained a discreet man. The singing star has managed the feat of revealing very little about his family, whom he wishes to protect from the spotlight. Father of six children, he leads his private life away from media pressure. W9 looks back on its journey on August 24, 2022 in an exciting documentary. If the artist is careful not to speak about his own, it is one of his relatives, his childhood friend Jean Bender, who will reveal more in a book written with the authorization of the singer-songwriter, All it takes is a sign. The author of the book returns in particular to his first marriage, with Catherine Morlet.
Since his beginnings, Jean-Jacques Goldman has remained very modest about his private life, as Jean Bender recounts in his interview for Tele-Leisure. “He really separated his family life and his star life. And he didn’t want it to get mixed up! He always wanted to put that barrier between Jean-Jacques and Goldman. And stay Jean-Jacques for his family and friends. Success meant that he was not often at home but he tried to be as much as possible: as soon as he did a show or a concert, he returned immediately.”
Jean-Jacques Goldman knew Catherine Morlet from childhood because their parents were friends. Very much in love, he saw only her and he never needed to multiply the encounters. “We thought it was weird: he was already an adult as a teenager“, says Jean Bender. He underlines the maturity of his friend: “QWhen we don’t need to multiply the encounters, it’s because we already know ourselves well.”
The couple enters the interpreter ofFly Me and Catherine Morlet, who became a psychologist, gave birth to three children: Caroline, born in 1975 and who followed in her mother’s professional footsteps, Michael, born in 1979 and co-founder of the My Major Company label, and Nina, born in 1985 who chose to become a pediatrician. Some explain the end of their love story because of the immense success of the artist, in great demand in France and beyond. “He suffered a lot from having sacrificed his first family life on the altar of his career. He didn’t want to make the same mistake when he remarried in 2001“, explained Jean-Pierre Pasqualini, music specialist, in 2015.
Indeed, Jean-Jacques Goldman has built a new family with Nathalie Thu Huong-Lagier, born in 1979, Franco-Vietnamese and then a mathematics student and fan of the singer. They married in 2001 and three other children were born from their union: Maya (2004), Kimi (2005) and Rose (2007). It is in Marseille that the family now lives peacefully, after having lived for years in London.