PIAF: “A song that I wrote, La vie en rose”

This is Edith Piaf at the height of her fame, performing at New York's Carnegie Hall in 1956.

From the grime of a Paris slum, to the sparkle of Carnegie Hall, Edith Piaf's amazing trajectory is still hard to believe. She was born Edith Gassion in 1915. Her mother was a street singer, her father a circus contorsionist. Both were alcoholics. She ended up in the care of her paternal grandmother who ran a brothel. When her father took the little girl back to help with his roving street show, she began singing to make extra money.

The film "la Vie en Rose" by French director Olivier Dahan, paints an impressionistic picture by jumping back and forth in time.

Olivier Dahan: “I didn't want to make a biopic. I wanted to make a portrait so I read every book, every biography, I've met a lot of people, but my only wish was to make something true and honest about her.”

And this portrait shows many of the tragic moments in Edith Piaf's life. When she was teenager, she gave birth to a daughter, Marcelle. The child died of meningitis. Piaf was devastated by the loss, but kept singing on the streets to make a living.

In the film, Piaf is played by Marion Cotillard, and her singing voice is dubbed by Jil Aigrot.

Edith Piaf could have remained an unknown street singer like her mother. But her life took an extraordinary turn when she was discovered in 1935 in Paris by a night-club owner named Louis Leplee. He's played by Gerard Depardieu. Leplee asked her to audition for him, and he hired her immediately. He also nicknamed her "la mome piaf" or "the sparrow kid," because of her small size. She was only 4-foot- 8.

Piaf's career took off with her first recording in 1935, but another tragedy hit the following year when her benefactor Leplee was murdered. Piaf was suspected of complicity in the crime. The suspicions almost destroyed her career. Fortunately, Piaf had met a songwriter and voice coach at Leplee's club. His name was Raymond Asso. Asso took her under his wing and remained her coach for years. She said she learned everything from him about how to sing and perform. Thanks to Asso, who wrote the song "Mon Legionnaire," Piaf became a star.

During World War II, Piaf aided the French resistance. She penned her signature love song "la vie en rose" in 1945. In the film actress Cotillard lip-synchs this English version of the song which Piaf recorded in 1950.

As her fame grew, so did her entourage. It included many friends. One was Ginou Richer. Richer was a teenager when she met her idol Piaf in 1946. She and Piaf hit it off right away, and remained the best of friends for more than 15 years. Richer, who lives in the south of France, describes the relationship this way.

Ginou Richer: "I think Edith was my most beautiful love story. We had all of love's closeness and feelings, except for sex. We were jealous of each other, possessive of each other, we couldn't be without each other. It was a very powerful kind of love."

Richer says the film "la Vie en Rose" is an insightful and accurate portrait of Piaf. She likes the film so much that she has seen it eight times. When it comes to the actress, Marion Cotillard, who plays Piaf, Richer says she was stunned by the resemblance.

Ginou Richer: “For me, Marion does not PLAY Edith, she IS Edith.”

Ginou was there when Piaf conquered New York the first time in 1948. But she conquered more than her audiences. She met the man who would become the greatest love of her life. His name was Marcel Cerdan. He was a Moroccan-born French middleweight boxer. Even though Cerdan was married at the time and had a family in Morocco, the singer and the boxer became inseparable. Edith Piaf wrote one of her greatest songs "hymne a l'amour" for Cerdan. Ginou Richer knows the song well, because Piaf dictated it to her.

Ginou Richer: “That's the song that says "should life tear you away from me, if you die or are away fom me, I won't mind if you love me, because I will die too and we will have eternity."

Richer says it's as if Piaf had a premonition when she wrote this song in 1949. In October that year, Marcel Cerdan died in a plane crash on his way to New York where Piaf was waiting for him. On the day she learned of his death, Piaf performed her concert as planned. Overwhelmed by grief, she could barely stand. Piaf started using morphine, whether to dull the pain of grief, or from injuries she suffered in a car accident sometime later. But Piaf was a survivor. She kept touring to the end of her life. In 1959, exhausted, sick and addicted to morphine, she fainted on stage. People began referring to the concert series as Piaf's "suicide tour." A year later, a TV reporter asked if she had been afraid of dying on that tour.

Piaf said: "I thought I was going to die but I wasn't frightened. In fact it was almost a relief because I thought I could no longer sing, and life without singing did not interest me."

In her last couple of years, Piaf still managed to record hits such as "non rien de rien" or No Regrets. Edith Piaf died in October 1963 at the age of 47, her health ruined by alcohol and drugs. But as Ginou Richer said, "She died at 47 but she lived 4 times faster than anybody else. So she died a very old lady." Her funeral procession in Paris drew hundreds of thousands of people.