Patachou

Patachou

Birth : 1918-06-10, Paris, France

Death : 2015-04-30

History

Henriette Ragon (10 June 1918 – 30 April 2015), better known as Patachou, was a French singer and actress. She was an Officier of the Légion d'honneur. Born in the 12th arrondissement of Paris, Henriette Ragon began her working life as a typist, then a factory worker, a shoeseller and an antique dealer. In 1948, with her husband Jean Billon she took over a cabaret-restaurant in Montmartre, called Patachou. (Their son Pierre Billon had some success as a singer in the 1970s and wrote J'ai oublié de vivre for Johnny Hallyday.) She began to sing in the bistro, and journalists began to call her Patachou after the name of her cabaret (pâte-à-choux means cream puff dough). Georges Brassens sang there, and together they sang the duet "Maman, papa". She was the first to interpret other songs he composed such as "Le bricoleur", "La chasse aux papillons", etc. The evening she sang them for the first time, she suggested her audience stay to the end of the show and meet the writer of these songs, and Brassens went up on to the Patachou stage for the first time and sang Le Gorille and P..de toi. Sometimes she would collect half-ties (she would snip the neckties of customers reluctant to join in the singing and immediately staple them to the ceiling, a habit which has created a very original decor of the place - hundreds of neckties hanging above) – Thomas Dewey and Errol Flynn were among her victims. Her first records were released in 1952. She appeared at the Bobino, a Montparnasse music-hall, toured in France and then further afield. From 1953 onwards, she could be seen on-stage at the Palladium, the Waldorf Astoria, and Carnegie Hall, and throughout the United States. From the beginning of the 1970s she toured Japan and Sweden where 'L'eternal Parigot', with her cheeky Parisian register, was popular. Patachou was made Officier of the Légion d'honneur on 1 January 2009. Patachou died on 30 April 2015 at the age of 96. Source: Article "Patachou" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.

Profile

Patachou

Movies

Les petites mains
Marguerite
After the closure of a lace factory in Calais, Andrée, Lulu and Solange are out on the street.
Belphegor, Phantom of the Louvre
Geneviève
A collection of artifacts from an archeological dig in Egypt are brought to the famous Louvre museum in Paris, and while experts are using a laser scanning device to determine the age of a sarcophagus, a ghostly spirit escapes and makes its way into the museum's electrical system.
Adventures of Félix
Mathilde Firmin
A charming comedy about going on a rather long walk. Félix is a laid-back guy living in the bleak northern coastal town of Dieppe. He lives happily with his lover Daniel and is a soap opera enthusiast and HIV-positive. After losing his job, Félix decides to find the father he never knew in Marseilles. Agreeing to meet Daniel in the southern port city in a week's time, Félix throws on his backpack and starts hiking. On his way, he discovers that family need not always be connected by blood.
Pola X
Margherite
A writer leaves his upper-class life and journeys with a woman claiming to be his sister, and her two friends.
Tendre piège
Madeleine
The engagement of a young couple is spoiled by the antics of their relatives.
Le Coeur Etincelant
A young woman is sure that her son is alive
Wild Target
Mme. Meynard
Into the solitary life of middle-aged hitman, Victor Meynard, come two people: Antoine, a youth who becomes Victor's apprentice, and Renée, a bold thief Victor's been hired to kill because she cheated a mobster. When circumstances prevent Victor from killing her, the gangster sends two more teams to do it (and to dispatch Victor and Antoine). Victor decides to help Renée, and the unlikely trio ends up at his house with his temperamental mother; there, as they hide out, Victor's attraction to Renée grows, she discovers his vocation and fears he's going to kill her, and an ultimate showdown with their hunters is inevitable.
Les matins chagrins
Dan, a journalist, lives alone with his daughter since his wife left him for a friend. When he accepts an appointment with him, he finds him dead. Dan decides to investigate the circumstances of the death.
The Carpathian Mushroom
Madame Ambrogiano
A miraculous mushroom is discovered by a film director's daughter.It would be used to cure an actress.
Avec sentiment
La Rumba
Meyrals
Paris, 1938. In a lavishly decorated nightclub, couples dance the syncopated rhythms of Latin America: Rumba, Cucaracha, Tango, and also the Charleston, Foxtrot and Boston. Among beautiful women, local pimps and Mussolini's spies brush each other on the dance floor, and in the streets. A police inspector is charged with a difficult task, to clean-up the city streets - just when bodies start falling around, as the Mafia and the spies tend each other deadly traps.
Faubourg St Martin
Mme Coppercage
Imagine a slightly dilapidated three star hotel in the tenth arrondissement run by a very distinguished lady with moral fibre and panache, Mrs. Coppercage. Alongside tourists visiting Paris, Mrs. Coppercage rents three rooms to three women at a monthly rate. Each woman is marked by life, yet they go on as best they can, never closing their eyes to the world around them, or to the men who impatiently await them. Faubourg Saint Martin opens as a love story and ends like a song as shots ring out and punctuate the chorus.
French Cancan
Yvette Guilbert
Nineteenth-century Paris comes vibrantly alive in Jean Renoir’s exhilarating tale of the opening of the world-renowned Moulin Rouge. Jean Gabin plays the wily impresario Danglard, who makes the cancan all the rage while juggling the love of two beautiful women—an Egyptian belly-dancer and a naive working girl turned cancan star.
Napoleon
Madame Sans-Gêne
The film follows the life of Napoleon from his early life in Corsica to his death at Saint Helena. The film is notable for its use of location shooting for numerous scenes, especially at the French estates of Malmaison and Fontainebleau, the Palace of Versailles, and sites of Napoleonic battles including Austerlitz and Waterloo.