On This Day in 1915

Edith Piaf spent much of her urchin childhood with her grandmother, a Parisian street performer. By the mid-1930s she had become one of Paris’s most in-demand nightclub acts and a popular recording artist. Her songs—"Non, Je ne regrette rien" and "La Vie en Rose" in particular—were international hits later covered by artists as diverse as Marlene Dietrich and Grace Jones. But her various marriages, affairs and friendships with the likes of Jean Cocteau, not to mention her alcohol and morphine addictions, cemented Piaf’s edgy otherness right up until her death from cancer in 1963. To this day her grave at Pere Lachaise Cemetery attracts more visitors than any other.