The sidewalk sparrow: Who is Edith Piaf?

Edith Piaf was born on December 19, 1915, in Belleville, Paris. Her birth name was Edith Giovanna Gassion. She was named Edith in memory of the British nurse Edith Cavell, who was executed for helping French soldiers escape from German POW camps during the First World War. She would get the nickname Piaf, meaning 'Sparrow', 20 years later.

Her mother comes from an immigrant family of half Italian, half Tbilisi origin; Annetta Giovanna Maillard and her father Louis-Alphonse Gassion was a street acrobat.

Édith Piaf's real name was Édith Giovanna Gassion. It's said that she was born on a sidewalk in Paris. While her life was marked by tragedy, her voice was a source of great comfort to many during World War II, and her tenacious spirit has inspired many artists over the years.

In 1917, when she was very young, her mother left her with her grandmother, who ran a brothel, and went to Istanbul. Her father, who came back from the war to pick up his daughter, left her in a brothel run by her mother. She stayed there for three years.

Edith Piaf, at a young age, had her eyes infected and was in danger of going blind. She started singing in the streets at the age of 14 alongside her father.

While singing in the streets, she met her first love, P'tit Louis; Meanwhile, Edith is 16 and Louis is 17. They live together and lead a rather poor life. Then they have a daughter. Sadly, her youngest daughter, Marcelle, dies of meningitis at the age of two. After that, Edith starts drinking and becomes an alcoholic.

Edith Piaf is arguably the greatest female French singer of all time and continues to sell huge amounts of recordings sixty years after her death.

Afterward, Edith's life is always on the streets, in cheap bars. In her own words, she has sunk so much that she doesn't even try to go up. She is eighteen years old and knows only the lower part of society. She also hasn't seen much except ugliness. So she finds herself right in the middle of the bars, pimps, and prostitutes in Pigalle. She is forced to sell her body by her boyfriend Albert.

In 1935, while trying to get rid of Albert, the owner of Gerny's cabaret, Louis Leplée, listens to Edith singing in the street and persuades her to sing in her cabaret. Edith Piaf achieved overnight success under the name La Môme Piaf. Louis Leplée makes her stage name "Piaf". And soon after, Louis Leplée is strangely killed in a sauna.

Edith Piaf became famous first in cabaret and variety shows, and after 1936, with her radio work and the records she released. She achieved great fame with the song "La Vie en Rose" after World War I. With numerous tours to the United States in the late 1940s, the English version of the song also topped the world charts.

Edith Piaf, who started to go in and out of the same circles with famous people from the 1940s, was the person who discovered Yves Montand in 1944. In the early 1950s, she would take Charles Aznavour on tour and introduce her to the music world.

Since the age of 16, many men have entered Edith Piaf's life. Among them were her child's father, Louis Dupont, a pimp named Albert, and a giant artist like Yves Montand.

The man she loved most in her life was middleweight world champion boxer Marcel Cerdan. Cerdan was married to someone else, she was already a well-known person in France. And while flying from Paris to New York in October 1949 to meet Edith Piaf, her plane crashed. There was no survivor of this accident, she. After Marcel Cerdan died, Edith changed completely; She became addicted to painkillers, alcohol, and morphine. Afterward, due to a traffic accident on a rainy day, her spinal cord could not heal throughout her life, and she had to walk half-hunched.

Edith Piaf married her first "official" wife, Jacques Pills, in October 1953. She divorced in 1957. In her second marriage; She married the Greek Theo Sarapo, 20 years younger than her, on October 9, 1962.

Edith Piaf died of liver cancer on October 10, 1963, in Grasse, France, at the age of 48.

The Catholic Church's Archbishop of Paris refused to hold Edith Piaf's funeral because of her life. Tens of thousands of fans joined the procession as her coffin was taken to the Pere-la-Chaise cemetery. The number of those present at the ceremony in the cemetery exceeded 100,000.

The 2007 film "La Mome" (The Sidewalk Sparrow), directed by Olivier Dahan, tells the life story of Edith Piaf.

La vie en rose (1946), Hymne à l'amour (1949), Milord (1959), Non, je ne regrette rien (1960) are some of her most famous pieces.