Piaf comes back to the Olympia and sings her own epitaph

By the autumn of 1960 Piaf had been off the stage for the best part of a year, weakened by two car crashes, surgery and the morphine that had followed them. She had just turned 45 and the newspapers were writing her obituary in advance. Bruno Coquatrix, who ran the Olympia, was close to bankruptcy and needed her; she needed a reason to stand up.

The reason arrived in October, when the composer Charles Dumont and the lyricist Michel Vaucaire came to her apartment with a song she had refused before. She made them play it again and again and decided on the spot that it would open her return. Non, je ne regrette rien is a three-minute declaration that nothing in the past is worth a second thought, sung by a woman whose past had nearly killed her. Days before the run began, she performed it in full for the television magazine Cinq colonnes à la une, which is the footage that survives.

The Olympia run opened on 29 December 1960 and was extended into April 1961. It saved the theatre and gave Piaf the song that would define her; she dedicated it to the French Foreign Legion, who adopted it as a marching song. She died in October 1963.