Serge Reggiani

Serge Reggiani is a French chanson legend who first rose to fame as a singer in the 1960s after already having established himself as an actor in the cinema decades earlier. Born on May 2, 1922, in Reggio Emilia, Italy, he moved to France with his family at age eight. In the 1940s he established himself as an actor in the French cinema, most notably appearing in the Marcel Carné film Les Portes de la Nuit (1946) in addition to many others. He remained active in the cinema from the 1940s until the end of the century, acting in over 80 films total. During the 1960s, while in his forties, Reggiani made a surprising foray into the recording music industry and released his full-length album debut, Serge Reggiani Chante Boris Vian (1964), on the Disques Jacques Canetti label. The album showcased the songwriting of Boris Vian, a prolific Parisian writer whose body of work Reggiani would return to in subsequent years. Serge Reggiani Chante Boris Vian was fairly well received upon its release, and Album No. 2 (1967) followed a few years later on Disques Jacques Canetti. In 1968 Reggiani switched to Polydor and released Et Puis... (1968), the first of over a dozen of his albums on the label issued over the course of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s. He then switched to the Tréma label for a series of latter-day albums during the 1980s and '90s. Reggiani died on July 23, 2004, in Paris. A long line of best-of collections were compiled in the wake of his death, most notably the box set Une Vie de Passi (2005).