Fréhel
Marguerite Boulc'h ( artist name: Frehel; Pervenche; born July 13, 1891 in Paris, † February 3, 1951 in Paris) was a French chanson singer and actress.
Life
About her childhood and youth Frehel has numerous anecdotes circulated, which will have only limited review as historical facts. Her parents came from Primrose Trégastel in Brittany, the father, a former sailor, his mother a housemaid, who sought to make a living in Paris and in the early years were educated by the grandmother 's daughter in Primrose Trégastel. She is said to have occurred at the age of five years accompanied by a blind man as a street singer and contributed to the family income since the age of eight, after his father's death, by doing odd jobs.
Her real debut as a singer she had in 1906, at sixteen, at the Brasserie de l' Univers and then soon gained notoriety as representative of the social realist chanson. Colette described the eighteen- year-old as a " little singer so very novice in this mode that it has not yet had the time, the chestnut -colored hair to turn to oxygen blond. She has only just made the transition from the boulevard exterior to the stage and still can not grasp that they are now 210 francs a month earned her voice " (La vagabonde, 1957) itself.
The highlight of her career, she saw even the time of her affair with Maurice Chevalier, which then, however, after she left for Chevalier, Mistinguett, a deep personal crash and eleven years of alcohol, ether and cocaine addiction followed. She lived in this time outside of France, including Konstantin Opel, Russia and Romania, and returned only in 1923 back to Paris. There she witnessed a spectacular comeback and soon joined in films on ( Coeur de lilas 1931, Le Roman d'un tricheur 1936, Pépé le Moko - In the dark of Algiers 1936). This second phase of their success, however, lasted only a few years. End of the 1940s she lived temporarily in a poor home in Le Vésinet in Paris, the last years of her life she spent depleted in a little hotel in the Rue Pigalle.