Edith Piaf

Though her life was marked by sickness, tragedy and other hardships from beginning to end, the famous French chanteuse with the throaty voice became the epitome of classic Parisian-style romance for her legions of fans. Born Edith Giovanna Gassion in 1915, she was abandoned by her mother and reared by her grandmother; while traveling with her father, a circus acrobat, she began singing for pennies on the street. Discovered by a cabaret promoter who renamed her Piaf, or "sparrow," (and was later brutally murdered), Edith enjoyed a meteoric rise to stardom and by 1935 was singing in the grandest concert halls in Paris. Piaf was married twice, but her great love was the boxer Marcel Cerdan, a world middleweight champion who was killed in a plane crash en route from Europe to New York in 1949. It was for Cerdan that Piaf sang the achingly romantic "Hymne a l'amour," celebrated all over the world as one of her best loved ballads. After a near lifelong struggle with drug and alcohol addictions, Piaf died of liver cancer on the French Riviera in 1963. Her grave is one of the most visited in Paris's world famous Pere Lachaise cemetery.