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Queer Trivia
She was a French singer and actor.
Born in 1900 in the Pie district of Saint-Servan-sur-Mer in Brittany, France, she was the daughter of a 28-year-old single mother. In 1907, her mother married Eugène Prudent Rocher.
When she moved to Paris in the late 1920s, she adopted a name inspired by a district of Saint-Servan where she had once lived.
By early 1930, she had become a popular singer and opened a fashionable nightclub called La Vie Parisienne. She lived openly as a lesbian.
One of the singer’s most famous publicity stunts was branding herself as the “most painted woman in the world.” She posed for many of the era’s most renowned artists, including Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Raoul Dufy, Tamara de Lempicka, Marie Laurencin, Francis Picabia, and Kees van Dongen. Her only condition for sitting was that she be given the finished portraits to display in her nightclub. By then, she had amassed thirty-three paintings of herself. La Vie Parisienne became one of the most fashionable nightspots in Paris.
Her most famous portrait was painted by Tamara de Lempicka. They met in the early 1930s, and she asked the artist to paint her. Tamara agreed but with the condition that she pose nude. She consented, and the portrait was completed in 1933.
During the occupation, her nightclub was frequented by German officers. In 1941, she recorded a version of the song Lili Marleen with French lyrics by Henri Lemarchand. After the war, she was convicted of collaboration during the Épuration légale and was banned from public life for five years.
She died on 30 March 1983 in Cagnes-sur-Mer, where she is also buried. A decade earlier, in 1973, she had donated 40 of her portraits to the town. They are now on permanent display at the Château-Musée Grimaldi.
Do you know her name? The answer is at the bottom of the email.
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