Serge Reggiani

Serge Reggiani earned renown as a French chanson legend after attaining vocal prominence in the 1960s, well after he had already secured standing as a cinema actor many years prior. Born May 2, 1922, in Reggio Emilia, Italy, he arrived in France with his family once he turned eight.

During the 1940s he secured his footing in French films, most prominently with a part in Marcel Carné’s Les Portes de la Nuit (1946) and in dozens of other productions. Screen work occupied him continuously from the 1940s onward until the century’s close, ultimately spanning more than eighty motion pictures.

In the 1960s, already in his forties, Reggiani made an unexpected entry into recorded music by issuing his first full-length album, Serge Reggiani Chante Boris Vian (1964), on Disques Jacques Canetti. The release presented songs written by Boris Vian, the prolific Parisian author whose catalog Reggiani would revisit on later projects. The album met with solid approval, and Album No. 2 (1967) appeared soon afterward, again on Disques Jacques Canetti.

Switching to Polydor in 1968, he delivered Et Puis... (1968), the opening title in a run of more than a dozen albums the label would issue across the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. For the recordings that followed in the 1980s and 1990s he moved to the Tréma imprint.

Reggiani died July 23, 2004, in Paris. In the years immediately after his death a succession of career-spanning collections appeared, among them the box set Une Vie de Passi (2005).