Singer Dani, who was also an actress, model or magazine leader and had a comeback in 2001 with the song like a boomerang, died Monday at the age of 77, his manager told AFP on Tuesday. The artist died of “consequences of a malaise” in the region of Tours where she lived, we learned from the same source.
She had just finished touring her latest album. Golden Horizons and she was already finishing the preparation of a new album. Dani had chosen to call this new record Attention Departure. “We were warned, she had just forgotten to tell us that it would be imminent”wrote in a Facebook message his professional entourage.
“Nothing was more important to her than creating, singing, being surrounded by those she loves”, can we still read. “If Dani inspired so many artists – photographers, filmmakers, lyricists, composers, directors – it’s because she was a powerful breath of life, an entire nature, overflowing with love and energy”adds its management. “She’s a real character, she has a real depth, there’s no affectation in her, she doesn’t play a role, there’s a real desire to sculpt an artist’s trajectory”described to AFP in 2020 Bertrand Dicale, specialist in French song.
Dani was the queen of “Paris by night” in the 70s, at the helm of L’Aventure, a trendy nightclub, the French version of the mythical Studio 54 in New York. François Truffaut chooses her for the role of Liliane in The American nightOscar 1974 for the best foreign film.
Born in 1944 to a shoemaker father and a shoe seller mother – both of Catalan origin – Dani left Perpignan at the age of 19 for Paris and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. She quickly stood out for her silhouette. From 1964 to 1966, she worked as a photographer for the newspaper French days. “When I started out, I was totally unconscious. Hoping to pose for fashion photos, I knocked on the door of ‘Jours de France’, the only magazine we read in Perpignan with ‘Elle'”she told AFP in 2016. The following week, she was on the cover.
The girl takes up a career as a model. She frequents the trendy places of the capital – the Café de Flore, at Castel… – and there meets the one who will become her husband, Benjamin Auger, then photographer of Salut les amis. In 1966, she turned to music and released her very first record Tomboy, the beginning of a long discography. His first hit appeared two years later: Dad just married the maid.
Her career began: she sang alongside Tom Jones at the Alhambra. In 1974, she was selected for Eurovision to represent France, with the song Life at twenty-five. Finally, French television withdrew her from the show and did not broadcast the competition scheduled for April 6, the day of national mourning due to the death of President Georges Pompidou. The singer continues on her way and does the first part of Claude François.
Then, the cinema adopted her: she met François Truffaut or even Claude Chabrol. She stands out in The American night made by the first, or A women’s affair, creation of the second. She also turns on television alongside actors and actresses like Michel Bouquet and Claude Jade. Director of a nightclub in Paris, The Adventureshe became the muse of Parisian nights, before retiring for a while to her house in the Vaucluse.
In 1987, the former muse yéyé recounts her descent into hell in Drug the galley. Shunned by record companies because of her frequentation of artificial paradises, she returned to the front of the stage thanks to Etienne Daho in 2001. The latter offered her to sing in a duet Like a Boomerangtitle composed for her by Serge Gainsbourg but failed for Eurovision and forgotten. “Etienne Daho told me ‘If you want to get out of it, you have to sing again’. I answered him ‘are you sick or what?’ (laughs)“.
Since then, she had regained an iconic status, which embarrassed her. “There is a frozen side while I feel like I am in motion”she confided to AFP in 2020. She preferred to speak of a “atypical course” – model, singer, actress, magazine leader, florist… “Was I chosen or did I choose? Who knows!”wondered Dani in his autobiography The night does not last.