Dalida

Over the span of more than three decades, Dalida collected 45 gold record awards along with two platinum certifications for her recordings throughout Europe, the Middle East, and Japan. A major star across France and much of continental Europe, she placed hit singles in three successive decades even as personal difficulties mounted after the early 1960s.

Born Yolande Gigliotti to Italian parents residing in Cairo, she grew up in a stable middle-class household until the Second World War erupted. When Egypt aligned with the Allies, her father was detained for four years in an internment camp because of his Italian citizenship. Yolande Gigliotti attended a religious school and trained in stenography, expecting to settle into an ordinary office routine, yet by age 17 her striking appearance led her to enter various talent and beauty contests. In 1954, the year she was crowned Miss Egypt, she made her screen debut in the Egyptian film Sigarah Wa Kas under director Niazi Mostafa. She adopted the stage name “Dalila” after being likened to Hedy Lamarr in the biblical epic Samson and Delilah, and the spelling was later adjusted to Dalida once she reached France.

She departed Egypt in 1955 seeking film work in Paris. Although cast in Marco de Gastyne’s Le Masque de Toutankhamen, her decisive break came from a brief singing engagement at the club La Villa d’Este. There she attracted the attention of Olympia Theater producer Bruno Coquatrix, who had previously presented Charles Aznavour and Edith Piaf, as well as radio producer Lucien Morisse. The pair guided her early career, with Coquatrix presenting her to French audiences and Morisse eventually becoming her husband. Record executive Eddie Barclay, himself a former jazz pianist, signed her to his Barclay label; her second single, “Bambino,” later also recorded by the Springfields, became a major European success in 1956. The following year she received a gold record for one million sales of that single across the continent. Subsequent hits encompassed “Gondolier” (1957), “Come Prima ‘Tu Me Donnes’” (1958), “Les Gitans” (1958), “Ciao Ciao Bambina” (1959), “Les Enfants du Piree” (1960), and “La Danse de Zorba” (1965), the last being a vocal adaptation of the theme from the film Zorba the Greek. Beginning in 1960 her brother, known professionally simply as Orlando, produced her sessions and helped sustain her popularity through the 1960s and afterward.

As rock & roll arrived in the early 1960s, Dalida adjusted to the shifting sound by employing a rhythm section with greater drive and by covering French-language versions of material originally performed by the Drifters (“Garde-moi La Derniere Danse” and others) and the Kingston Trio (“Que Sont Devenues Les Fleurs” and others). By 1964 she had reportedly sold thirty million records worldwide, although nearly all sales occurred outside English-speaking markets, stretching from the Middle East to Germany. Comparable to her contemporary Petula Clark, who likewise bridged the 1950s and 1960s, Dalida underwent repeated image shifts—from the dark-haired, elegantly gowned look reminiscent of Italian singer Alma Cogan in the mid-1950s to a striking blonde in shorter, more revealing attire by the 1960s—making it hard to recognize her as the same artist. She also sustained a parallel film career, appearing in more than a dozen French and Italian productions between 1955 and the close of the 1960s, ranging from spy thrillers such as Rapt Aux Deuxieme Bureau (1958) to light sex comedies like Menage Italian Style (1965).

From 1956 onward Dalida became a constant subject for photographers, who rarely captured an unflattering image of the tall, curvaceous performer. Balancing her singing and acting commitments, she was repeatedly linked in the press with a series of professional, personal, and romantic partners, among them actor Alain Delon and Eddie Barclay, before marrying Lucien Morisse; the union dissolved early in the 1960s. An unrelenting concert schedule combined with romantic instability began to exact a price. Her life took a tragic turn, more akin to Edith Piaf’s than to Petula Clark’s, when her then-companion Luigi Tenco, also a singer, took his own life at the 1967 San Remo Festival after failing to advance. Dalida, who discovered the body, attempted suicide for the first of several times shortly afterward. Upon recovering, she redirected her work toward more introspective material, including the notable Arabic-language release “Salwa wa Sala,” meaning “Safe and Sound,” issued to mark the return of Egyptian prisoners of war following the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

Although Verve Records founder Norman Granz had sought to introduce her to American listeners as early as 1958, twenty-one years passed before she performed in the United States. On the eve of her Carnegie Hall debut in New York, writer Anthony Haden-Guest noted that her following, especially in France, bordered on the cultish, yet remained virtually unknown in the States, where she never entered the charts. Since adapting to the disco wave in the 1970s with the pioneering French track “J’attendrai,” she had also cultivated a substantial gay following in France, drawn both to her larger-than-life media persona and to the turbulence surrounding her private life.

Her former husband Lucien Morisse later died by suicide, and Haden-Guest likened her story to that of Judy Garland, though musically she resembled Astrud Gilberto more closely. Dalida’s subsequent marriage to a man presented as the Count of St. Germain, who proved neither titled nor exclusively interested in women, further underscored the chaos in her personal affairs and only heightened her appeal to devotees. Amid these events she received the French award Oscar Mondial du Disque for “Gigi L’Amoroso,” prevailing over entries that included Frank Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night,” and recorded the Arabic peace song “Salma ya Salama” to commemorate Egyptian president Sadat’s summit with Israel. By the 1980s her schedule had moderated as she entered her fifties; although she still appeared at least a decade younger, she no longer performed the two hundred concerts per year that had marked her peak.

In 1986 she returned to Egypt to star in director Youssef Chahine’s The Sixth Day, an old acquaintance from her earliest years, delivering a performance widely praised by critics. She kept Paris as her base and remained a major concert attraction through her final decade. On May 3, 1987, Dalida was discovered dead from a barbiturate overdose at age 54, an apparent suicide. More than a decade later a devoted following persisted across Europe; millions of additional records had sold, numerous websites remained active, and MCA-Universal, inheritor of Polygram’s catalog that encompassed the Barclay label, released the three-CD retrospective La Legende in France chronicling her life and work.