Catherine Sauvage

Born Jeanine Marcelle Saunier in Nancy on May 29, 1929, Catherine Sauvage was a privileged interpreter of old-time poets and Saint-Germain-des-Prés. After discovering chanson through Charles Trenet on the radio, she moved to Paris and began performing in cabarets, first at Le Bœuf sur le Toit in 1948, then at L'Arlequin and L'Écluse. She took the name Catherine Sauvage in reference to the Russian empress and a classmate. Her encounter with Léo Ferré was a revelation that changed her repertoire, and when Philips artistic director Jacques Canetti discovered her at the Trois Mailletz, she devoted an entire album to him, covering "Paris canaille", "L'Homme", "Jolie môme", "Monsieur William" and others, including her first hits "La Fille de Londres", "Toi qui disais, qui disais, qui disais" and "Mets deux thunes dans l'bastringue". After appearing at the Trois Baudets, Catherine Sauvage went on to headline at the Olympia in 1954 and 1955, then at Bobino in 1960 and at the Théâtre de la Gaîté-Montparnasse the following year. Her growing repertoire included poems by Aragon, Baudelaire, Hugo, Desnos, Éluard, Queneau, Mac Orlan, Colette and Prévert set to music, as well as songs by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, which were the subject of an entire album in 1964. As early as 1954, in parallel with her singing career, she performed in plays by Brecht, Claudel and Dürrenmatt, and appeared in the films Paris canaille (1956) and Deux heures à tuer (1966). In 1965, she recorded a selection of songs by Gilles Vigneault, whom she had met in Canada, and returned to France with a new show at Bobino, resulting in the album Le Bonheur (1968). Other studio albums followed, in between concerts in Lebanon, Mexico and Japan. After retiring from the music scene in the 1980s, she gave a final concert at the Francofolies de La Rochelle festival in July 1994. Stricken by cancer, Catherine Sauvage died in Bry-sur-Marne (Val-de-Marne) on March 19, 1998, aged 68.

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