Juliette GRECO
Muse to the Parisian literary scene of the '50s, godmother of songwriter-led '60s French pop, and a self-reinventing torch singer from the '70s into the 2010s, Juliette Gréco was one of the great French recording artists of the 20th century. Born in Montpellier in 1929, Gréco was classically trained at the Paris Opera as a youngster. Forced to flee Paris at the outbreak of the Second World War, and practically orphaned when her mother was jailed for her resistance to the Nazis in 1943, Gréco sought refuge with her former French teacher in the St. Germain des Prés quarter of Paris.
In the later years of the war, the literary and artistic world of the Left Bank was flourishing, and Gréco became a fixture in this world, befriending Sartre and other writers of renown, and appearing in the theater and on...