The restaurant kid who became France's most Armenian voice

Shahnour Vaghinag Aznavourian was born in Paris in 1924 to Armenian immigrants, a family of artists who ran a small Armenian restaurant on the rue de la Huchette, a favourite hangout for actors and musicians. His parents put him in front of an audience early. At nine he dropped out of school and took the stage name Aznavour, which translates as nobleman in Armenian.

What followed was a career of more than seven decades. He recorded over 1,200 songs in several languages and wrote or co-wrote more than a thousand for himself and others. His voice was a vibrato tenor, clear and ringing high up, with gravelly depth below. Jean Cocteau, who cast him in a 1960 film, joked that before Aznavour despair was unpopular. Critics compared him to Frank Sinatra, and one called him a French pop deity.

Among the songs that carried his name abroad are “Hier encore” and “For Me Formidable”, both evidence of his gift for turning memory and regret into something close to conversation. Between 1974 and 2016 he collected around sixty gold and platinum records worldwide, and his record company put total sales above 180 million units.

Alongside the music ran a second life of public service. After the 1988 Armenian earthquake he founded Aznavour for Armenia with his friend Lévon Sayan, and from 1994 he served as Armenia's ambassador to UNESCO. He and his sister Aida received the Raoul Wallenberg Award for sheltering Jews during the Second World War. He began his last world tour in 2014, received a Hollywood Walk of Fame star in 2017, and gave his final concert in Osaka in September 2018. He died a few weeks later, on 1 October.