Mireille Mathieu

Mireille Mathieu (miʁɛj matjø; born 22 July 1946) is a French singer. She has recorded over 1200 songs in eleven languages, with more than 122 million records sold worldwide. Mireille Mathieu was born on 22 July 1946 in Avignon, France, as the eldest daughter of a family of fourteen children; the youngest brother was born after she moved to Paris. Her father Roger and his family were native to Avignon, while her mother Marcelle-Sophie (née Poirier) was from Dunkirk. She arrived in Avignon in 1944 as a refugee from World War II after her grandmother had died, and her mother went missing. Roger, with his father Arcade, ran the family stonemason shop just outside the Saint-Véran cemetery main gate. The Mathieu family have been stonemasons for four generations. Today the shop is named Pompes Funèbres Mathieu-Mardoyan, owned and managed by her sister Réjane's family. The Mathieu family lived in poverty, with a huge improvement in their living conditions in 1954, when subsidized housing was built in the Malpeigné quarter near the cemetery. Then again in 1961 they moved to a large tenement in the Croix des Oiseaux quarter southeast of the city. Roger had once dreamed of becoming a singer, but his father Arcade disapproved, inspiring him to have one of his children learn to sing with him in church. Mathieu included her father's operatic voice on her 1968 Christmas album, where it was mixed in with the Minuit Chrétiens song. Mathieu's first paid performance before an audience, at age four, was rewarded with a lollipop when she sang on Christmas Eve 1950 during Midnight Mass. A defining moment was seeing Édith Piaf sing on television. Mathieu performed poorly in elementary school because of dyslexia, requiring an extra year to graduate. She was born left-handed, and her teachers used a ruler to strike her hand each time she was caught writing with it. She became right-handed, although her left hand remains quite animated while singing. She has a fantastic memory, and never uses a prompter on stage.