INsults, pressure, criticism… We were not yet at the time of the omnipotence of social networks, but Vanessa Paradis remembers having started the profession in great violence. Invited to participate in the documentary Up girls, on Arte, which is interested in women who have revolutionized the French scene by imposing their fights and their identity, the singer returned to a period that she still describes today as “horrible”. “The beginnings were very violent. I was 14 and, at 14, it’s not going well for anyone… We wonder who we are, what we’re going to become, if we’re good enough, she remembered. It was awful, awful. »
At the beginning of the 1980s, young Vanessa dreamed of becoming a singer or an actress, a project which her uncle Didier Pain, an actor who had worked in the industry, would tackle. She accompanies him on the sets, records a twist at 11, participates in the Eurovision for children in Italy, until the day she releases, in 1987, an improbable song, “Joe le taxi”, written in a hurry. -quickly by Roda-Gil, on which no one bets three kopeks. The success is as huge as it is dazzling: eleven weeks at the top of sales in France, more than a million copies sold, not to mention the enthusiasm in Belgium, Germany, England, Canada… Here is the lolita propelled to the rank of summer starlet.
“I was young, I had a cartoon voice, so childish, and then, sometimes, I sang very very loudly, it was atrocious, remembers Johnny Depp’s ex-girlfriend. I didn’t want to look shy, I wanted to look confident, but I looked pretentious, so I didn’t help soften it. The success comes at the end of her third year, even though she must enter high school in Fontenay-sous-Bois. “I took the RER in the morning, people looked at me like an animal in a cage and didn’t do without commenting out loud. People must think that you lose your hearing as soon as you don’t sing. »
Dirty bird names
Here she is quickly caught in a whirlwind, chaining TV shows, recordings, tours in Europe, under the eye of the profession and a public sometimes tired of the overdose. “I was a child and the comments were really monstrous. They insulted me, they treated me with all the names of birds, they attacked me on my physique, on my music, my lack of talent, with really dirty names on a very young girl. It almost went wrong, but my great luck is to have the parents that I have, really extraordinary parents who surrounded me, gave me a lot of freedom too. »
His parents ? André and Corinne Paradis, who pampered their daughter while giving her a solid education. Very quickly, her mother will regularly accompany her daughter to temporize, support and console, while negotiating a little flexibility with the headmaster of the school… But, faced with success, Vanessa Paradis ends up abandoning her studies to devote herself to her budding career. , which will take a new turn with Variations on the same love youthe album signed Serge Gainsbourg and released in 1990.
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“She was too young, too star”
In the meantime, the lolita of French song has been transformed under the influence of Florent Pagny, who will play the pygmalions and avoid a few pitfalls for her – he is 11 years older than her. “The whole of France was making fun of her, the singer had told Marc-Olivier Fogiel in 2016. I found it not good, especially since, when I met her, I realized how much it was a huge star, and not just another little kid. I hadn’t left to have a love affair with her at all, I had rather left to be the big brother and accompany her, help her out of the mess she was in. Because she was too young, too star, and nobody understood how to manage all that. »