Édith Piaf, une « étoile sans lumière » dans le cinéma français populaire des années 1950

This paper explores the gap between the singing career of Edith Piaf, a national star of international fame in the 1950s, and the thinness of her career in movies. The hypothesis to explain this shift in popular cinema, where links between film and song are many, is that there is no more room in the French cinema of the time for a “chanteuse realiste,” unlike what can be observed in the 1930s. To test this hypothesis, the paper analyzes the imperfect matching of roles and performance of Piaf, between her star persona and her image as “chanteuse realiste” in seven films between 1946 and 1958, focusing on the movies where she is headlining—Etoile sans lumiere (Marcel Blistene, 1946)—and those where she is guest-star—Boum sur Paris (Maurice de Canonge 1953) or French Cancan (Jean Renoir, 1955).