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French singer (born 1946)

Mireille Mathieu (miʁɛj matjø; born 22 July 1946) is a French singer. She has recorded over 1,200 songs in eleven languages, with more than 122 million records sold worldwide.

Mireille Mathieu was born on 22 July 1946 in Avignon, France, as the eldest daughter of a family of fourteen children; the youngest brother was born after she moved to Paris. Her father Roger and his family were native to Avignon, while her mother Marcelle Sophie (née Poirier) was from Dunkirk. She arrived in Avignon in 1944 as a refugee from World War II after her grandmother had died, and her mother went missing. Roger, with his father Arcade, ran the family stonemason shop just outside the Saint Véran cemetery main gate. The Mathieu family have been stonemasons for four generations. Today the shop is named Pompes Funèbres Mathieu Mardoyan, owned and managed by her sister Réjane's family. The Mathieu family lived in poverty, with a huge improvement in their living conditions in 1954, when subsidized housing was built in the Malpeigné quarter near the cemetery. Then again in 1961 they moved to a large tenement in the Croix des Oiseaux quarter southeast of the city. Roger had once dreamed of becoming a singer, but his father Arcade disapproved, inspiring him to have one of his children learn to sing with him in church. Mathieu included her father's operatic voice on her 1968 Christmas album, where it was mixed in with the Minuit Chrétiens song. Mathieu's first paid performance before an audience, at age four, was rewarded with a lollipop when she sang on Christmas Eve 1950 during Midnight Mass. A defining moment was seeing Édith Piaf sing on television. Abandoning higher education, at age 14 (1961), and after moving to Croix des Oiseaux, she began work in a local factory in Montfavet (a suburb southeast of town) where she helped with the family income and paid for her singing lessons. Popular at work, she often sang songs at lunch, or while working. Like her parents, she is a short woman at 1.52 m (5 feet) in height. Her sister Monique (mo. nikə), born on 8 July 1947, began work at the same factory a few months later. Both were given bicycles on credit to commute with, making for very long days, and many bad memories of riding against the mistral winds. Self described as very stubborn in her autobiography, she wrote about singing love songs that the audience thought inappropriate for a young girl, Mathieu and her father both thought he was an American based on his name and manner, and nicknamed him l'Américain. Stark had worked with singers such as Yves Montand, and the relationship between him and Mathieu is often described as resembling that between Colonel Tom Parker and Elvis Presley. Stark is credited with making her a star and the successor to Piaf. By 1968, under his careful management, she was France's most popular singer. In the middle of her seven consecutive performances on Télé Dimanche She was hailed in the press, in France and abroad, as the Piaf d'Avignon (Sparrow of Avignon), in reference to Piaf's nickname "Sparrow of the Streets". Stark then abandoned the Piaf direction he was taking her in. The Olympia performance convinced a skeptical Paul Mauriat to work with Mireille, and songwriter André Pascal joined forces to develop her into a successful act. Together they wrote new modern material for her: Mon crédo, Viens dans ma rue, La première étoile and many other hit songs. Mathieu spent all of 1966 and 1967 touring. It was then, during a car journey to another concert, that Stark advised Mathieu that she was finally debt free, and worth more than a million francs (US$200k in 1967). She had always prayed that she could get her family out of poverty, but the touring and singing were much more important at the time. In her autobiography, she stated her first major purchases were a vehicle for her father's business and a large home for her parents and siblings. Most importantly, she had a telephone installed for the family, so her parents no longer had to go to the pharmacy to talk to her while she was in Paris. Her one regret, was that she was unable to see her grandmother Germaine in the hospital before she died because of all the tour contracts. Mathieu arrived in Paris with two dresses and a change of underwear, and Stark set her up in style, sent for Mathieu's two eldest sisters, and let them go shopping for a week. He then rented her a home and a maid in the smart district of Neuilly after she had won, and made sure she only had her singing to worry about. Stark recorded all the expenses though, and he was fully compensated before a franc was ever put in Mathieu's account. While on tour in February 1968, Mathieu was in a car accident in which she fractured one of her vertebrae; the injury incapacitated her for three months. She writes in her book, that they received a note which said "we will get you next time" but it was not proved to be anything but an accident. In 1971, Barclay was unable to meet the demand for records. Stark then made a contract for Philips Records to issue all the singles and EPs, resulting in a million dollar lawsuit from Barclay for breach of contract. Barclay's contract was scheduled to run until 1972. In 1972, Mathieu toured Canada and produced a live album. Stark had his first heart attack while making arrangements for this concert. In 1983, Mathieu formed another publishing company, Abilene Disc. This is the company used to publish recordings, and her management agency run by her sisters Monique and Christiane. In 1985, Mathieu joined Plácido Domingo in performing a children's show called The Tales of Cri Cri. This television special used puppets along with fifty years of traditional Mexican songs, producing popular versions in Spanish, French and English. Mathieu's father Roger died this same year. In 1988, W. Kordes' Söhne, a German rose breeding company, introduced the Mireille Mathieu Rose to match her favorite lipstick color. Mathieu also published her autobiography with co author Jacqueline Cartier. The title is Oui je crois, "Yes, I Believe", which is taken from the lyrics of Mon crédo, her first recording. The book was seen as a final chapter in her career and Stark was also exhausted and overweight by this time. In 1989, President François Mitterrand invited Mathieu to sing a tribute to General Charles de Gaulle. In November 2010, she was awarded the Russian Medal of Friendship by President Dmitry Medvedev at a State Dinner. She was in Russia and the Baltic States throughout November, returning to Paris after a concert in Warsaw, Poland on 28 November. In January 2011, Mireille was promoted from Chevalier (9 December 1999) to Officier of the Légion d'honneur. In November 2011, Mathieu cancelled her concert in Israel for the second time in 2011. The promoter again failed to meet the required ticket sales. In March 2012, Mathieu, with Jean Claudric and his Orchestra, were in Siberia, Russia visiting three cities: Perm (21 March), Tyumen (24 March), and Yekaterinburg (26 March). During an interview in Moscow, Mathieu mentioned that the group Pussy Riot had committed a sacrilege in the church by having a political demonstration against President Putin. French television program "On n'est pas couché" edited out the second half of her statement, and called her a tool of President Putin. Her lawyer André Schmidt sued the station for defamation. The suit was dismissed at trial in July 2014. The part that was edited out was "as a woman artist and a Christian, I beg the indulgence of these three girls." The group of three women were convicted and sentenced to two years in prison for being hooligans, and inciting religious hatred. In October 2012, Mathieu announced on her web page that she is re releasing her Chante Piaf, with two new recordings added, in celebration of her 50th year as a singer, and the 50th year of Piaf's death. Also that month, she had to cancel some of her shows in Russia (Rostov, Volgograd, Samara, and Ufa). She had contracted these shows through a Yekaterinburg company called Mix Art, through her Malta agent Foresa Investment Ltd. She stated that Mix Art "acted in a highly unprofessional and even fraudulent way." She was able to salvage the tours on 3 November 2012 in Moscow, 5 November 2012 in Saint Petersburg and 7 November 2012 in Krasnodar. She also performed the rescheduled concert in Ufa on 7 March 2013. In December 2013, her lawyers won a lawsuit against MGM Home Entertainment for failing to compensate her production company Abilene Disc for the 1967 song Les Yeux de l'amour (The Eyes of Love), used in the German version of the movie Casino Royale. Since 2009, she has been the main guest star of the Spasskaya Tower Military Music Festival and Tattoo, held on Moscow's Red Square. On 5 September 2013, during her concert event of the festival, she sang in a light dress under an icy rain and a gusty wind, refusing to take an offer for a coat as disrespectful to the people freezing in the stands. Russian TV's Culture channel praised her performance on that day as a feat. Mathieu had an active tour schedule for 2014, celebrating her 50th year in show business (she dates her career from the year she won her first singing contest in Avignon). Her first concert was going to be in Kiev, and she held out hope it would go on, but finally cancelled it seven days before "due to the instability." Her France 50th Anniversary tour ran from October to November 2014. Mathieu performed her 50th Anniversary tour in Germany and Austria from 1 to 16 March 2015, singing at sold out venues in twelve different cities. She credits her sister and manager Monique for keeping the general audience ticket prices reasonable. In March 2015, she announced on her web page that all the concerts in Russia were cancelled "due to the economic situation." On the concert web site, it states that the Russian currency had collapsed, and it was no longer possible to finance the concert and travel arrangements. On 26 May 2015, Mathieu sang at the "Culture Without Borders" (Culture sans frontière) project at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. She took part at a concert titled The Allies of the Great Victory: A Musical Story, with the participation of Jazz Band of Igor Butman (Russia US); other soloists include Allan Harris (US), Sanya Kroitor (Israel), Yakov Yavno (US), Igor Butman, Mikhail Gluz (Russia), Polina Zizak (Russia) and other celebrities. On 30 July 2015, she returned to Byblos, Lebanon after 41 years for the Byblos International Festival. Her sisters Monique—who is also her manager—and Marie France accompanied her mother on the trip, who then made a brief appearance with her on stage, escorted by the family servant Hervé Marc. On 20 March 2016, Mathieu's mother died at the age of 94 from a pulmonary embolism. She was entombed in the mausoleum Mathieu at the Saint Véran cemetery in Avignon.

Mathieu does not have a publicist or feel the need to expound on her private life. She is a devout Catholic and attends Catholic Mass with her family.