Charles Trenet, celebrated for six decades in France as composer and singer, has died aged 87 in a Paris hospital as a result of a stroke.
Perhaps best known for his song La Mer, Trenet was a legend of French popular music, along with Edith Piaf, Maurice Chevalier, Jacques Brel and Georges Brassens. He was a vastly prolific songwriter, with more than 1,000 titles to his name.
Trenet was born in Narbonne in 1913. He arrived in Paris in 1933 and became a huge star in his early 20s. He was one of the last links to the country's great music-hall tradition and possessed a lightness of touch that belied a rigorous professionalism. "Without Trenet," Jacques Brel once remarked, "we would all be accountants."
The apparently light-hearted, good-natured "official" Trenet, associated with the 1930s Popular Front period and the elation which accompanied the first paid holidays for workers, nevertheless had a complex personality and was capable of dark, spiky humour, often relating to the terrors of childhood or the constraints of religion.
During the war and the German occupation French pro-Nazi collaborators attacked him, attempting to suggest that he was of Jewish origin. Trenet himself wrote songs which had subtle overtones of resistance, such as the nostalgically patriotic Douce France.
Trenet left France for the US in 1945 and remained there for six years. On his return he resumed his music-hall career and performed regularly until his retirement in 1975, tirelessly writing new songs and also finding the time to turn out novels and an autobiography.
Known for his warm voice and love songs with lyrics that blended images of fantasy and clever wordplay, Trenet once said: "I make songs like an apple tree makes apples. They come from inside of me."
He retained his sunny outlook on life to the end, touring and performing and giving interviews as long as his health permitted. His artistic longevity he attributed to his determination to remain active and to a regime of early rising and brisk walks. His epitaph, he joked, should be: "Born a poet, died an athlete."