1. Georges Moustaki wrote about 300 songs for some of the most popular singers in France, including Edith Piaf, Dalida, Francoise Hardy, Yves Montand, Barbara, Brigitte Fontaine, Herbert Pagani, France Gall, Cindy Daniel, Juliette Greco, Pia Colombo, and Tino Rossi, as well as for himself.
Georges Moustaki was born Giuseppe Mustacchi in Alexandria, Egypt, on 3 May 1934.
At the age of 17, after a summer holiday in Paris, Georges Moustaki obtained his father's permission to move there, working as a door-to-door salesman of poetry books.
Georges Moustaki began playing the piano and singing in nightclubs in Paris, where he met some of the era's best-known performers.
Georges Moustaki's career took off after the young singer-songwriter Georges Brassens took Moustaki under his wing.
Out of gratitude, Georges Moustaki adopted the first name of the only musician he called "master".
Georges Moustaki was introduced to Edith Piaf in the late 1950s by a friend whose praise of the young songwriter was so flattering that Piaf, then at the peak of her fame, requested somewhat sarcastically to hear him sing his best works.
Georges Moustaki asked me to go and see her perform that same evening at the Olympia music hall and to show her later the songs I had just massacred.
Georges Moustaki soon began writing songs for Piaf, one of which, Milord, about a lower-class girl who falls in love with an upper-class British traveller, reached number one in Germany in 1960 and number 24 in the British charts the same year.
Georges Moustaki then sang it himself, on a 45rpm disc, and it became a huge hit in France, spending six non-consecutive weeks at number one in the charts.
In 2008, after a 50-year career during which he performed on every continent, Georges Moustaki recorded his last album, Solitaire.
Georges Moustaki married Annick "Yannick" Cozannec when he was twenty years old and she was twenty-five.
Georges Moustaki died on 23 May 2013 at a hospital in Nice, France, after a long battle with emphysema.
Georges Moustaki was buried according to Jewish rites in a family vault at the Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris a few meters from the grave of his former amour Edith Piaf.