Johnny Hallyday

Jean-Philippe Smet took the stage name Johnny Hallyday and brought rock and roll to France in 1960, arriving as the country entered its postwar boom. Over 57 years he released 79 albums, sang more than a thousand songs, and turned concerts into spectacle - once leaping from a helicopter into the Stade de France, another time drawing a million people to the Eiffel Tower with ten million more watching on television. He worked with the era's top French artists, earned five diamond albums and ten Victoires de la Musique, and became a fixture across four generations. More than 2,500 magazine covers carried his face. When cancer killed him in December 2017, a million lined the Paris streets for his funeral procession and fifteen million watched on TV - a send-off for someone the rest of the world had never heard of.