Death of Georges Garvarentz (March 19, 1993)

French-Armenian composer Georges Garvarentz was a prolific author of music for films and musical collaborator of Charles Aznavour.

He was born Diran Garvarentz on April 1, 1932, in Athens, Greece, to a family of Armenian immigrants. He received his elementary education in his birthplace. His father, poet and teacher Kevork Garvarentz, was a genocide survivor and the author of the well-known “March of the Volunteers” (Gamavoragan Kayle Yerk, popularly known as Harach Nahadag…).

After the occupation of Greece by the Axis forces (Germany, Italy, and Bulgaria) in 1941, the terrible economic situation forced the Garvarentz family to move to Italy via Vienna in 1942. They first settled in Venice, and then in Milan (1943). However, after Kevork Garvarentz’s sudden death in 1946, his widow moved to Paris with their two children.

Georges entered the Samuel-Moorat Armenian lyceum in Sevres and later studied at the Paris Conservatory, from where he graduated in 1952.

In 1956 Garvarentz met Charles Aznavour and started writing music for his lyrics. They wrote over 100 songs, including “Prends garde à toi” (1956), “Et pourtant” (1962), “Il faut saisir sa chance” (1962), “Retiens la nuit” (1962), “La plus belle pour aller danser” (1964), “Hier encore” (1964), “Paris au mois d'août” (1966), “Une vie d’amour” (1980). From the 1950s Aznavour and other star singers like Johnny Hallyday, Sylvie Vartan, Dalida, Gilbert Becaud, and Mireille Mathieu, interpreted Garvarentz’s more than 700 songs. His disc “Les plaisirs démodés” was edited in 350 versions and 23 million copies. He won the “Chansonnier” special award in 1964.

In 1965 the composer married Aznavour's sister, Aida Aznavourian, a singer herself.

Garvarentz also composed over 150 film scores, including scores for Un taxi pour Tobrouk (1960), Les Parisiennes (1962), The Devil and the Ten Commandments (1962), Le Rat d’Amérique (1963), That Man in Istanbul (1965), The Sultans (1966), Surcouf, le tigre des sept mers (1966), Triple Cross (1966), The Peking Medallion (1967), Caroline chérie (1968), They Came to Rob Las Vegas (1968), The Southern Star (1969), The Heist (1970), Love Me Strangely 1971), Someone Behind the Door (1971), The Pebbles of Etratat (1972), Murder in a Blue World (1973), Killer Force (1976), Teheran 43 (1981), Hambone and Hillie (1983), The Triumphs of a Man Called Horse (1983), Too Scared to Scream (1985), Yiddish Connection (1986), A Star for Two (1991), and Catorce estaciones (1991).

He was the author of a musical comedy, Deux anges sont venus, and an operetta, Douchka.

Garvarentz visited Armenia twice, in 1977 and 1988. His collaboration with his brother-in-law Aznavour also reflected their common Armenian roots. In 1975 they composed the song “Ils sont tombés” (They Fell), on the sixtieth anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. Thirteen years later, in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake of Armenia in December 1988, they composed “Pour toi, Arménie” (For You, Armenia), gathering a collection of well-known French singers for its release in video. The income from the song was entirely destined to the assistance for the victims.

In 1991 Garvarentz suffered a heart attack and his precarious health, which took him from one hospital to the other, did not stop him from composing. He passed away on March 19, 1993, at the hospital of Aubagne, near Marseilles.

Birth of Alice Sapritch (July 29, 1916)

Alice Sapritch (her name was originally spelled Sapric, the Turkish spelling of the Armenian word saprich/սափրիչ “barber”), was a French actress of Armenian origin with a forty-year career in cinema, theater, and television.

She was born in the Istanbul district of Ortaköy on July 29, 1916, and had a childhood that she qualified as unhappy. Her family had serious financial problems due to the gambling debts of her father. She abandoned Turkey at the age of thirteen with her family and continued her studies in Brussels before moving alone to Paris. She entered the Cours Simon, one of the oldest courses of theatrical formation for professional comedians, and then the Conservatoire d’Art Dramatique. Her theatrical career, mostly in dramatic and tragic roles, would span over thirty-five years (1949-1984).

At the end of the German occupation, she met writer and actor Guillaume Hanoteau, whom she married in 1950. The same year marked her debut in the movies with Le tampon du capiston (The Captain’s Buffer), on a script written by her husband. For the next thirty-five years she would appear in some 40 movies, including François Truffaut’s Tirez sur le pianist (Shoot the Pianist, 1960), where she played along Charles Aznavour. In the 1960s she had remarkable roles in several TV adaptations of novels by French authors like Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, Honoré de Balzac, and François Mauriac. She divorced in 1970, and her great breakout came a year later, at the age of 55, when she made a lasting impression with two roles, one comic and the other tragic, in the feature movie La folie des grandeurs (Delusions of Grandeur), along with  two great actors, Yves Montand and Louis de Funès, and the TV movie Vipère au poing. However, throughout the 1970s, she took roles in a series of French-style comedies qualified with the colloquial word nanar (movies that were so bad that they were good). She mostly abandoned this genre in the last years of her career and returned to dramatic roles in André Téchiné’s Les Soeurs Brontë (The Bronte Sisters, 1979), as well as in a TV film, L’affaire Marie Besnard (The Affair Marie Besnard, 1986), which earned her the prize “7 d’or” for best fiction comedian. Her last role in cinema was in an American film, Amy Heckerling’s National Lampoon’s European Vacation (1985).

She played her first and last role in TV films as Catherine de Médicis (queen of France in the sixteenth century), both in 1961 and in 1989. She wrote many autobiographical works (Alice, My Dinners in the City, Public Woman: My truth, and Unfinished Memoirs) and a novel (An Endangered Love, 1973), all in French. 

She remained quite close to the French Armenian community, and participated in many of their gatherings. A year before her death, her life was the subject of a documentary, Le passé retrouvé: Alice Sapritch (The Past Retrieved: Alice Sapritch), by Mireille Dumas (1989). She passed away in Paris on March 24, 1990, and was cremated in the cemetery of Père-Lachaise, in Paris, with her ashes being spread over the Seine River.