Remembering Charles Aznavour

The singer-songwriter and actor left school at age nine having been encouraged by his father to become a performer. Thus began a career that lasted for over 85 years. He was still working, touring in Japan, until a few weeks before he died on 1 October 2018. Michael Darvell recalls the genius talent that was Charles Aznavour…

I met Charles Aznavour in 2000 when he came to London to promote Lautrec, the musical he wrote about the celebrated French painter. I was to interview him at his hotel and it was a daunting thought to be meeting a world-renowned genius. This man was a singer, a songwriter and an actor of no mean achievement who had become popular all over the world through his songs and his performances and was actually a living legend.

On meeting him he could not have been nicer – he was funny, truthful, modest and immediately engaging and with no side about him at all. We got on famously and he remains one of the best interviewees I was fortunate to meet in the many decades of talking to the famous in the worlds of theatre and cinema.

His show, Lautrec the Musical, ran for only a few months at the Shaftesbury Theatre before it disappeared forever, although I imagine the French liked it. I remember enjoying the show and it turned out to be the best of a rather sorrowful bunch of shows that London was staging at the time. Aznavour wrote the songs for the show but was not in it himself. Perhaps it might have run longer had he cast himself in the starring role. However, he was very proud of his leading man, Sevan Stephan, who was really good as Toulouse-Lautrec, and not that small but convincing enough opposite his leading lady, Hannah Waddingham as Suzanne.

Charles Aznavour was born Shahnour Vaghinag Aznavourian in Paris to Armenian immigrants Michael and Knar Aznavourian. His father, a chef and a singer, encouraged young Charles to perform from an early age. He left school at nine and became an extra in films and appeared on stage too and as a dancer in nightclubs.

Later on, in his early twenties, he was discovered by Edith Piaf and she employed him as the opening act in her show at the Moulin Rouge. She encouraged him as a singer and he became immensely popular singing in French, English, Spanish, Italian, Russian, German and Armenian. He had a voice that could cover the scale from tenor down to baritone and noted for his rather gravelly vocalising which became his endearing signature way of singing.

His songs were popular all over the world and many famous artists have sung his songs, of which he composed about a thousand. He also recorded over 90 remembered for the song ‘She’, written by Aznavour with lyrics by Herbert Kretzmer (of Les Misérables fame) – it stayed in the UK charts for several weeks in 1974.

Artists who have sung and recorded Aznavour’s songs include Piaf, of course, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, Serge Gainsbourg, Liza Minnelli, Shirley Bassey, Petula Clark, Tom Jones, Elton John, Dusty Springfield – in fact are there any singers who haven’t sung his songs, as it seems that everybody from Elvis and Dylan to Domingo and Pavarotti have all either sung his songs or worked with him.

Aznavour has been called the natural descendant to Maurice Chevalier or even the French Frank Sinatra. Like those two great singers Aznavour was also an actor of some renown. He was in films from 1936 and made some more pictures during the 1940s and ’50s, but after Jean Cocteau cast him (uncredited) in Testament d’Orphée in 1960, François Truffaut then gave him two parts in Tirez sur le pianiste.

After that Aznavour appeared in both French and American films including Georges Franju’s La tête contre les murs, Taxi for Tobruk, Candy, The Adventurers, The Games, And Then There Were None, Sky Riders and many more including Volker Schlöndorff’s The Tin Drum and Claude Chabrol’s The Twist.

In all Aznavour made nearly 80 appearances in films and television series. And of course many of his songs (‘She’, ‘The Old-Fashioned Way’, ‘Yesterday When I Was Young’ etc) were used in films and on TV.

He leaves an enormous legacy of songs, performances, music and lyric writing. It is hard to think of anyone else who has done so much to keep his audiences entertained and to leave the world such a wealth of material. He may only have been a modest, five foot three singer of chansons, but we shall never see his like again.

In 1997 Aznavour was awarded an Honorary César in France and won countless honours all over the world, including a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He was a political activist and created a charity for Armenia following its 1988 earthquake, becoming the Armenian delegate at the UN in Geneva.

Charles Aznavour was married three times, first to Micheline Rugel and then Evelyne Plessis, but both relationships ended in divorce. Finally, he married Ulla Thorsell in 1967 and they were together until he died. He was father to six children, Seda and Charles from his first marriage, Patrick from his second marriage, and Katia, Mischa and Nicolas from his third marriage.

* Charles Aznavour was born on 22 May 1934 and died on 1 October 2018. R.I.P.