In later years, as illness overtook her — she was diagnosed with cancer in 2004 — she retreated into astrology and gloomy autobiographical writings. “The pessimism I attribute to myself, or that others attribute to me, is perhaps quite simply realism,” she was quoted as saying in 1997, after a concert with the singer Julien Clerc.
Françoise Madeleine Hardy was born on Jan. 17, 1944, in German-occupied Paris, in a clinic at the top of the Rue des Martyrs, in the Ninth Arrondissement, in the middle of an air raid. Her mother, Madeleine Hardy, was a bookkeeper, and her father, Étienne Dillard, who was largely absent during her childhood, was an already-married industrialist. The class divide between her mother and her sometime father marked her life, as she made clear in interviews.
She went to a Roman Catholic parochial school in the neighborhood and later attended classes at the Institut d’Études Politiques and the Sorbonne.
But it was the gift of a guitar from her father, after she had received her high school diploma at 16, that she later remembered would prove decisive. She would practice for hours in the kitchen of her mother’s tiny apartment. By age 17, she had landed her first recording contract.
She would later say that her long relationship with Mr. Dutronc, whom she met in 1967 and finally married in 1981, inspired the “sufferings, frustrations, disillusions and profound self-interrogations” that suffused her songs. They separated in 1988.
As her health declined in the 2000s after her cancer diagnosis, Ms. Hardy became an outspoken supporter of euthanasia. In 2016, she was placed in a coma, her doctors thinking that she would never wake up. She did, and went on to record another album, “Personne d’Autre” (“Nobody Else”), which proved to be her last, in 2018.
