Édith Piaf

Piaf sang on street corners as a teenager and was discovered outside a cabaret at nineteen. Barely a metre and a half tall, she became the voice of France with "La Vie en rose" and "Non, je ne regrette rien".

She died at forty-seven, worn out by illness and morphine. The archbishop of Paris refused her a funeral mass; forty thousand people followed her coffin to Père-Lachaise anyway, and traffic in the city stopped.