Francoise Hardy - Comment te dire adieu, Mon Amie la Rose...

Françoise Hardy, ‘close to the end’ of her life, argues for assisted suicide

The French singer says radiation has left her in immense pain, and fears a natural death would bring ‘even more physical suffering’

Françoise Hardy pictured in 2012. Photograph: Serge Benhamou/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images

Françoise Hardy, the French pop songwriter who found fame in the 60s yé-yé movement, has said she feels “close to the end” of her life in a new interview.

Hardy, 77, told Femme Actuelle that in 2018 she was diagnosed with a tumour in her ear. It followed her diagnosis with lymphatic cancer in the mid-2000s, and a hospitalisation in 2015 that led to her being placed in an induced coma. Her life was saved when doctors administered a novel form of radiation.

But years of radiation and immunotherapy have caused Hardy immense pain, she said, making it difficult to swallow. The interview was conducted by email due to Hardy’s difficulty speaking. She has previously said she is no longer able to sing.

She said: “My physical suffering has already been so terrible that I am afraid that death will force me to go through even more physical suffering.”

She told the magazine that she was in favour of assisted suicide. In May, she told Paris Match that “France is inhumane” for not legalising the procedure.

In the new interview, she said: “It is not for the doctors to accede to each request, but to shorten the unnecessary suffering of an incurable disease from the moment it becomes unbearable.”

Hardy said she would like to have the opportunity to choose to end her life, “but given my small notoriety, no one will want to run the risk of being removed from the medical order even more”.

She said her mother, suffering from Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, a neurological disorder, died by euthanasia “when she could not go any further in this horrible incurable disease”.

Françoise Hardy: Mon Amie la Rose – video

Hardy released her debut single, Tous les garçons et les filles, in 1962. A huge success, it put her at the forefront of the yé-yé pop phenomenon, albeit she would distance herself from that scene just a couple of years later as she made music with English producers and pursued commercial and creative independence.