The tall, lithe French actor Marion Cotillard was a surprising choice to play Edith Piaf. But she's utterly convincing as the legendary singer, writes Arminta Wallace
As a general rule, French popular music is a bit like French cheese: it tends to be squishy in the middle, and it never quite looks new. Sure, there are smart young French things, such as Daft Punk, but they're far more popular outside France than chez eux. And this is, let's not forget, the country whose president likes to hang out with - mon Dieu - Johnny Hallyday.
One French singer, and one alone, manages to transcend the relentless cheesiness of the chanson scene. Edith Piaf was, in many respects, a kind of proto-rock chick. Heavily into sex, drugs and booze, she was raised in a brothel and spent part of her childhood living in her father's circus. Men adored her. Jean Cocteau, the enfant terrible of French theatre, wrote a play for her. She was a size-zero femme fatale with the voice of a giant. And at a time when low-cut, skin-tight evening gowns were de rigueur for a female solo singer, she only ever appeared on stage in a black dress, plain to the point of severity.
Piaf's stormy life has now been re-created on the big screen, in a film called La Vie en Rose. The actress who plays her, Marion Cotillard, has already made a name for herself as the vengeful prostitute Tina in Jean-Pierre Jeunet's A Very Long Engagement and as the sultry Fanny in Ridley Scott's A Good Year. But as she lounges on a settee at Claridge's in London, one leg tucked casually beneath her bum, Cotillard looks too young, too cool and altogether too supple for the role of the neurotic, arthritis-ridden diva.
"My agent called me and said that Olivier Dahan, whom I didn't know, was about to write and direct a script about Piaf and he was thinking about me for the role," she says. How did she feel about being asked to play the French icon? A strange task, isn't it, for a French actor? And where did she begin?
"I didn't know anything about Piaf's life," Cotillard replies in her slow, careful, one-word-at-a-time English. "And when I started reading books about her I felt something. Close. Maybe I felt that I was able to understand her - and so I was about to meet a woman, not an icon. Yes. I felt the reality of that woman. So I was not so scared about touching the myth."
The next step was to get inside the character, rather than re-create a wax model of Piaf from the outside. "I didn't want to find a voice or gesture by trying to imitate her," Cotillard says. "What was important for me was to understand her energy and her feelings. Her heart. Maybe a little bit of her soul. Mixing this all together would, I thought, create something. I was searching for a certain authenticity, and when I felt that it would work through little things - wearing a dress or feeling that my body was not mine any more - then I would stop. What I was afraid of was to imitate her."
The result is a resemblance so extraordinary as to verge on the uncanny. And brave, too - for to venture inside the skin of Edith Giovanni Gassion isn't a journey for the faint-hearted. Piaf's parents were street entertainers, and her childhood, in early 20th-century Paris, was marked by poverty, neglect and even a spot of temporary blindness.
After a stint with her father's touring circus act she, too, sang on the streets of the French capital until she was discovered by the impresario Louis Leplée, who renamed her "la môme Piaf" ("the kid sparrow"). She became an overnight sensation in Paris, and her fame quickly spread. In 1949 she went to the US, where audiences were first bemused, then ecstatic: Piaf subsequently became the highest-paid performer stateside after Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby.
After a car crash in 1951 she became dependent on alcohol and morphine and suffered a long, slow, painful decline - though she kept performing almost to the bitter end.
The angst in Piaf's songs mirrors the drama in her personal life to the extent where, as Dahan puts it in his production notes for La Vie en Rose, she is "the perfect example of someone who places no barrier between her life and her art". Art and life, love and death: it's a perennially potent combination, and unhappy love affairs were a major ingredient in Piaf's particular mix. La Vie en Rose focuses on her relationship with Marcel Cerdan, a married middleweight boxer who was supposedly the love of her life - though cynics might be tempted to conclude that if he hadn't been killed in a plane crash, at the height of their highly public affair, he might well have ended up as one more in a long line of men who were used and discarded by the diva.
Dahan's film takes every French cliche in the book, from Gérard Depardieu (who plays Leplée) to St Thérèse of Lisieux via the Marseillaise, and - depending on one's viewpoint - either wallows mercilessly in them or sends them up to the skies in splendidly ironic fashion.
Despite being at the centre of the action, however, and despite being played by the French musician Jean-Pierre Martins, who's hunkier than Viggo Mortensen and classier than Cary Grant - Cerdan never really springs to life in the movie. Instead, it's the music that grabs all the attention as Cotillard lets rip with her re-creations of Piaf the performer.
The detailed work that went into Cotillard's performance was considerable. She spent hours studying how Piaf sang; not so much how she looked when she sang as how she produced the sound, how she moved her body, how she moved her tongue, how she breathed. As a result she makes Piaf's instantly recognisable style her own. The rat-a-tat vibrato; the raucous, almost masculine rasp; the flattening of every note until a last-minute swoop-up-to-the-pitch rescue; those terrifyingly crisp rolled "r"s. Cotillard never lets any of it slip. She even walks as Piaf did, slightly stooped, curled in on herself, her joints frozen into unnatural stiffness by arthritis. Was playing Piaf, literally, a pain in the neck?
"No, not the neck. The back," Cotillard says. "I wanted to be smaller all the time, so I was holding myself like . . . Well, I tried to contract this part" - she shrinks down into the settee - "and after the first week I had big pains. Then I started to take care of myself. Once I knew that the voice was working, that I didn't have to worry any more, I could relax a little bit, take pleasure in the work and take care of me. But after the movie I went to see someone because I was . . ." She clutches her back with alarming realism and directs a stream of medical-sounding French at the interpreter, who suddenly springs to life and responds with a translation that involves the words "chiropractic", "osteopath" and "kinotherapy".
"And an exorcist," adds Cotillard. She's joking, of course. Or maybe not. She holds out her hands, palms up, and sketches a mid-air version of one of those oh-so-eloquent Gallic shrugs the French are so good at. "Before I began this movie I would never have believed that I would one day have to fight to go back to myself," she muses. "By the time I finished, it was weird. I was in a state, and in a position, that I would never have believed possible. It's like when you lose someone or when you quit someone. It's painful. And the weird thing is that this character was inside me. I realised that I was afraid to leave Piaf alone - and immediately, when I had that thought, I was like, 'You are mad, darling! I mean, she was alone before you came. She was dead for years. Okay, let go!' "
Cotillard insists that she doesn't want this to sound mystical, because it isn't. It's simply part of the acting process. "If you are aware of that, it's not dangerous. I knew that, while I was on the set, I was not myself. The behaviour was not me. I was not tall, like I am; my humour was not mine; my voice was not exactly mine. But I knew it. I was always aware that I was not entirely myself, and that protected me from going crazy."
The critics will quickly come to a decision about whether Cotillard was haunted by the ghost of Piaf or the spirit of method acting. It remains to be seen whether La Vie en Rose will do a Walk the Line and restore Piaf, Johnny Cash-style, to the pop charts. So many of the "facts" of the diva's life are disputed that it may all get bogged down in a welter of arguments about who said what to whom and why. But there's no doubt that Piaf's music deserves to be discovered by a whole new audience. As Cocteau put it, there never has been anyone like her - and there never will be.
La Vie en Rose opens in cinemas on June 22nd