Mireille Mathieu Most Famous Song

[Noah Casanova]

MireilleMathieu was born on 22 July 1946 in Avignon, France, as the eldest daughter of a family of fourteen children; the youngest brother was born after she moved to Paris. Her father Roger and his family were native to Avignon, while her mother Marcelle-Sophie (ne Poirier) was from Dunkirk. She arrived in Avignon in 1944 as a refugee from World War II after her grandmother had died, and her mother went missing. Roger, with his father Arcade, ran the family stonemason shop just outside the Saint-Vran cemetery main gate. The Mathieu family have been stonemasons for four generations. Today the shop is named Pompes Funbres Mathieu-Mardoyan, owned and managed by her sister Rjane's family.[5][6][7]

The Mathieu family lived in poverty, with a huge improvement in their living conditions in 1954, when subsidized housing was built in the Malpeign quarter near the cemetery. Then again in 1961 they moved to a large tenement in the Croix des Oiseaux quarter southeast of the city.[8]

Roger had once dreamed of becoming a singer, but his father Arcade disapproved, inspiring him to have one of his children learn to sing with him in church. Mathieu included her father's operatic voice on her 1968 Christmas album, where it was mixed in with the Minuit Chrtiens song. Mathieu's first paid performance before an audience, at age four, was rewarded with a lollipop when she sang on Christmas Eve 1950 during Midnight Mass. A defining moment was seeing dith Piaf sing on television.[5]

Mathieu performed poorly in elementary school because of dyslexia, requiring an extra year to graduate. She was born left-handed, and her teachers used a ruler to strike her hand each time she was caught writing with it.[5] She became right-handed, although her left hand remains quite animated while singing. She has a fantastic memory, and never uses a prompter on stage.[9] Abandoning higher education, at age 14 (1961), and after moving to Croix des Oiseaux, she began work in a local factory in Montfavet (a suburb southeast of town) where she helped with the family income and paid for her singing lessons. Popular at work, she often sang songs at lunch, or while working. Like her parents, she is a short woman at 1.52 m (5 feet) in height. Her sister Monique (French: [mo.nikə]), born on 8 July 1947,[10] began work at the same factory a few months later. Both were given bicycles on credit to commute with, making for very long days, and many bad memories of riding against the mistral winds.[5] The factory went out of business, so Mathieu and two sisters (Monique, and Christiane) became youth counselors at a summer camp before her rise to fame, a summer where she had her fortune told by Tarot cards by an old Gypsy woman, saying she would soon mingle with kings and queens.[5]

Mathieu is Roman Catholic, and her adopted patron saint is Saint Rita, the Saint for the Impossible. Mathieu's paternal grandmother Germaine ne Charreton, assured her that Saint Rita was the one to intercede to God for hopeless cases. Beyond religion, like many artists, she is unabashed about superstition and luck. When asked to reveal some of her superstitions, she said: "The most important one is to never mention any of them." She has stage fright, and can often be seen making the sign of the cross before moving out on stage.[5][9]

Mathieu began her career by participating in an annual singing contest in Avignon called On Chante dans mon Quartier (We sing in my neighborhood). Photos depict the affair as rather drab with a cheap curtain and one projector light. The stage was only twenty feet square, and the singer had to share it with a large piano and musicians. A large, boisterous, and mostly young audience was very much in evidence. The judges sat at a table in front of and below the elevated stage. Anyone who signed the contract in the weeks before the show was allowed to sing. Talent scouts made this a worthwhile event for singers to participate in from hundreds of miles around.[5]

Mathieu's private singing lessons were by Madame Laure Collire, who was also a piano teacher in Avignon.[11] Self-described as very stubborn in her autobiography, she wrote about singing love songs that the audience thought inappropriate for a young girl,[5] thus losing to Michle Torr in 1962 when she sang "Les cloches de Lisbonne" at the first contest, and losing again in 1963 singing dith Piaf's "L'Hymne l'amour". In 1964, though, she won the event with another Piaf song: "La Vie en rose".[5]

Her win was rewarded with a free trip to Paris, and a pre-audition for the televised talent show Jeu de la Chance (Game of Luck), where amateur singers competed for audience and telephone votes. Her participation and train fare were arranged by Raoul Colombe, the deputy mayor of Avignon. Accompanied by a pianist at the studio, and dressed in black like Piaf, she sang two Piaf songs to the audition judges and left dispirited: Parisians at the studio made fun of her Provenal accent, and her dyslexia scrambled words.[5] For example, her sister and current manager Monique, is called "Matite" because Mathieu could not pronounce "petite" as a child.[5]

During a 1965 summer gala, added to the Enrico Macias concert by Raoul Colombe (her first manager), she met her future manager Johnny Stark.[5][12] Mathieu and her father both thought he was an American based on his name and manner, and nicknamed him l'Amricain. Stark had worked with singers such as Yves Montand, and the relationship between him and Mathieu is often described as resembling that between Colonel Tom Parker and Elvis Presley.[13] Stark is credited with making her a star and the successor to Piaf.[14] By 1968, under his careful management, she was France's most popular singer.[12]

Mathieu was invited to Paris by the impresario Rgis Durcourt to sing on the Song Parade television programme, on 19 November 1965. Johnny Stark had promised to write to her, but after months of waiting she gave up on him, and accepted Durcourt's offer. The truth has never been revealed how, but Mathieu was suddenly moved up to compete live on the Sunday 21 November 1965 episode of Jeu de la Chance, a talent segment of the popular French programme Tl-Dimanche. Stark's ex-wife Nanou Taddi worked at Studio 102, and probably recognized Mathieu, as she participated in her earlier pre-audition. Mathieu explained that Song Parade offered only one chance to sing, while "Jeu de la Chance" offered many chances to sing, but only if she won, and she intended to win. Both the studio audience and telephone voters gave her a slight lead over five-time winner Georgette Lemaire, so the producers called it a tie. Stark officially became her manager that night, and with his longtime assistant Nadine Joubert, helped prepare Mathieu to win the contest the following week and defeat Lemaire. Stark and Lemaire had a mutual dislike.[5] In a short film called La guerre des Piaf (War of the Sparrows), Mathieu and Lemaire are interviewed separately, both the same diminutive height. Mathieu is surrounded by her sisters Monique and Christiane, with Stark hovering in the background as she is interviewed for the first time on camera. She appears to be uncomfortable, staring at the floor during many of the questions, even looking dumbfounded at one point. Stark finally comes to her rescue. In a later interview, she underscored the importance of the event, stating, "For me, Paris was the end of the world. I had never taken a train or seen a camera before. I did not know what the outcome of the adventure would be."[15]

In the middle of her seven consecutive performances on Tl-Dimanche[16] she performed a concert at the Paris Olympia, which propelled her to stardom. She signed with Bruno Coquatrix, the owner of the Olympia, on 20 December, and performed the only three Piaf songs she had memorized, two days later.[5][16] She was hailed in the press, in France and abroad, as the Piaf d'Avignon (Sparrow of Avignon), in reference to Piaf's nickname "Sparrow of the Streets".[11]

All was not going well at this point. Mathieu said "I was managed to such mimicry of my idol that I thought I was not able to do anything else. It was instantly one of the biggest disappointments of my life."[17] Stark then abandoned the Piaf direction he was taking her in. The Olympia performance convinced a skeptical Paul Mauriat to work with Mireille, and songwriter Andr Pascal joined forces to develop her into a successful act. Together they wrote new modern material for her: Mon crdo, Viens dans ma rue, La premire toile and many other hit songs.[5] Her first album En Direct de L'Olympia, on the Barclay label, was released in 1966. Highly acclaimed, along with the singles and EPs from it, the album made her a star outside France.[5]

A regular early contributor of material was Francis Lai, who wrote two songs, C'est ton nom, and Un homme et une femme for her first album, and who often accompanied her with his accordion on television. Her first record was recorded in the EMI studios, with Paul Mauriat's band.[5] Mathieu's success led her record company, Barclay, to claim that they controlled 40% of the French pop record market.[18]

Mathieu spent all of 1966 and 1967 touring. It was then, during a car journey to another concert, that Stark advised Mathieu that she was finally debt-free, and worth more than a million francs (US$200k in 1967). She had always prayed that she could get her family out of poverty, but the touring and singing were much more important at the time. In her autobiography, she stated her first major purchases were a vehicle for her father's business and a large home for her parents and siblings. Most importantly, she had a telephone installed for the family, so her parents no longer had to go to the pharmacy to talk to her while she was in Paris. Her one regret, was that she was unable to see her grandmother Germaine in the hospital before she died because of all the tour contracts.

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