The Need to Express Himself
The need to express himself, to play, to give his voice… He has it in his blood. And for good reason. Michel Sardou is the son of Fernand Sardou, a singer and actor with an immense career. Like father, like son.
The Loss of a Father
Of course, every year the date of September 18 is difficult to live. It is the artist’s birthday, who died in Toulon on January 31, 1976 while he was about to meet his audience. “He died on stage,” Michel Sardou told Anne-Elisabeth Lemoine on the C à Vous set in August 2021. He died on his way into the theater where I’m going to sing at the Toulon Opera House. And paf. A gunshot to the head would have been the same thing. After the loss of a father, everything seems quite futile. Disputes with Juliette Armanet, for example, are quite useless. “He’s always there,” said the singer. When I get on stage, he’s there. My father was a cream of a man.
Drawing Inspiration from His Father
Michel Sardou had declared his love for his father Fernand by writing the song Il était là in 1982. Thinking of him, he remembers a “Provencal” with a strong character. “He was capable of having monumental rages, but they lasted two minutes,” he remembered on RTBF in June 2017. More than a father, Michel Sardou saw, in Ferdinand, a model. He also drew inspiration from him throughout his career since, in addition to albums and tours, he played, in the cinema, for Jean Boyer, Didier Kaminka or Thomas Crosky. “My father was very funny, he did movies in the morning, he went to the theater at night, he finished at the cabaret at 3 o’clock in the morning… I found it fabulous, me. So I said to myself, I’m going that way,” Michel Sardou assured in the On n’est pas couché show in September 2014. He started very young and he died, on stage, in Toulon. I’ve always said to myself that my dream, finally, would be to have the same career as him.
