Johnny Hallyday, the Elvis Presley of France, Is Dead at 74
Johnny Hallyday, the French answer to Elvis Presley, who kept audiences enthralled for nearly 60 years with his Gallic interpretations of American rock ’n’ roll and his turbulent offstage life, has died. He was 74.
His wife, Laeticia, said in a statement to the news media on Wednesday that he had died overnight. Mr. Hallyday announced in March that he had lung cancer.
The 1957 Presley film “Loving You” changed French culture forever when it inspired the 14-year-old Jean-Philippe Smet to pick up a guitar, twist his lips into a sneer and swivel his hips. As Johnny Hallyday, he gave French audiences a bad case of rock fever, touching off riots wherever he appeared singing hits like “Tutti Frutti,” “Blue Suede Shoes” and “C’est le Mashed Potatoes.”
Although he was little known outside the French-speaking world, Mr. Hallyday sold more than 100 million records, acted in more than 30 films and appeared on the cover of the big-circulation magazine Paris Match dozens of times. His career endured so long that when he released an album in 2008 called “Ça Ne Finira Jamais” (“It Will Never End”), the title sounded like a simple statement of fact.
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That album and its title song both reached No. 1 on the French charts.
Mr. Hallyday gave his fans more than recycled Elvis. His hard drinking, car crashes, wild partying and tempestuous love life made him a permanent headline in the French popular press. Readers breathlessly followed his on-again, off-again marriage to the glamorous singer and actress Sylvie Vartan, a roller-coaster relationship that led Mr. Hallyday to attempt suicide twice.
Critics scoffed at him as derivative, but his countless fans did not care. His outdoor concert at the Eiffel Tower in 2000 drew more than a half-million fans, and 9.5 million more watched it on television — about one-sixth the population of France.
Jean-Philippe Smet was born in Nazi-occupied Paris on June 15, 1943. His mother, a model, and his father, a Belgian circus performer, separated soon after he was born, and he was raised by a paternal aunt, Hélène, a former silent-film actress.
His upbringing was unusual. Hélène was a stage manager for her two dancing daughters, whom she shepherded from one engagement to the next in cities all over Europe, and Jean-Philipp became a kind of onstage mascot, singing while the girls changed costume.
The boy, whom Hélène’s American husband called Johnny, would later make use of the family stage name, the Hallidays.
Besides singing, Jean-Philippe appeared in commercials as a boy and played the role of a schoolboy in the 1955 Henri-Georges Clouzot thriller, “Les Diaboliques.”
Elvis Presley changed everything. “His voice, the way he moved, everything was sexy,” Mr. Hallyday told USA Today in 2000. “The first time I saw him, I was paralyzed.”
Mr. Hallyday began singing American rock songs at the Moulin Rouge and other clubs around Paris, and in 1959 he was signed by Vogue Records, which released his first album, “Hello Johnny,” in 1960, misspelling Halliday on the cover. The misspelling stuck.
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His first single, “Laisse les Filles” (“Leave the Girls Alone”) — often described as the first French rock song — was a minor hit. In 1961 he recorded his first million-seller, “Viens Danser le Twist,” a French-language version of the Chubby Checker hit “Let’s Twist Again.”
Like Presley, Mr. Hallyday pursued a second career as an actor. Unlike Presley, he eventually won serious critical respect for his work, especially in such later roles as a world-weary criminal in “The Man on the Train” (2002) and as a man who seeks revenge when his daughter’s family is attacked in “Vengeance” (2009).
He worked with Jean-Luc Godard, playing a fight promoter in “Detective” (1985), and tried his hand at comedy in the Constantin Costa-Gavras film “Conseil de Famille” (“Family Business”), from 1986, and the English-language farce “Crime Spree,” with Gérard Depardieu and Harvey Keitel, in 2003.
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Mr. Hallyday took music seriously too. Always current with the latest developments in Anglo-American rock, he made it a point to work with top talent outside France. Early in his career he recorded in Nashville with the vocal group the Jordanaires, who backed Presley on many records. The Jimi Hendrix Experience was his opening act in 1966, and he later brought the British guitarists Jimmy Page and Peter Frampton to France for recording sessions.
But his efforts remained largely unappreciated by English and American audiences.
In 1965, Mr. Hallyday married Ms. Vartan, his co-star in the film “Where Are You From, Johnny?” They divorced in 1980. Two subsequent marriages also ended in divorce.
In addition to his fourth wife, the former Laeticia Boudou, Mr. Hallyday is survived by their two daughters, Jade and Joy; David Hallyday, a son from his marriage to Ms. Vartan; and Laura Smet, a daughter from his relationship with the actress Nathalie Baye.
Mr. Hallyday’s career seemed to be on the wane in the early 1980s, but he rebounded with the album “Rock ’n’ Roll Attitude” (1985), the first in a string of midcareer successes that culminated in “Collection: Johnny Hallyday,” a 42-CD set issued to celebrate his 50th birthday, in 1993, in a limited edition of 8,000 copies. Although priced at more than $1,000, the sets sold out in two days.
President Jacques Chirac made Mr. Hallyday a member of the Legion of Honor in 1997.
Rumors of Mr. Hallyday’s retirement always turned out to be false. Like an opera star, he followed each farewell tour with another.
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With time the hard-rock edge softened, and he turned more and more to breathy ballads in the venerable French chanson tradition of Jacques Brel, Édith Piaf and Serge Gainsbourg. His sales never slowed. In 2002, his double CD “À la Vie, à la Mort!” (“To Life, to Death!”) sold 800,000 copies in its first week, a French record.
He released his 50th studio album, “De l’Amour,” in 2015. In November, months after he had disclosed his cancer diagnosis, an album of his hits as interpreted by other artists was released under the title “On a Tous Quelque Chose de Johnny” (“We’re All a Little Bit Like Johnny”).
“It is hard to explain the Johnny phenomenon to foreigners,” Arnold Turboust, a French songwriter, told The Independent of London in 2000. “He is a good singer, but there are many singers. He is a chameleon, a performer, an actor, rather than a great musical original; a pirate of other people’s styles. But to the French, he is part of our history, our psyche.
“We have all grown up with Johnny,” Mr. Turboust continued. “We remember his first love affair, his first fight, his first marriage, his first motorcycle. He is our family.”
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