Yves Montand

Yves Montand was an enormously popular singer in France, his adopted country, from the 1940s until his death. He also gave concerts around the world, but he was better-known internationally as an actor.

Montand was born Ivo Livi on October 13, 1921, in the village of Monsummano Alto in the Tuscany region of Italy near Florence. He was the youngest of three children of Giovanni Livi, a broom maker, and Giuseppina (Simoni) Livi. His father was involved with the Communist Party, and in May 1924 the family was forced to move to France to escape political persecution from the Fascists led by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. They settled in Marseilles and became naturalized French citizens in 1929. At 11, Montand dropped out of school to help support his family during the Depression by working in a noodle factory. He left that job two years later and began working in a hair salon run by his older sister; eventually he passed the test for his barber's license and got a job in another salon. But in September 1938, at age 16, he first sang at an amateur show, and he soon began making professional appearances. Recalling his mother's shout to come home to the family's second-floor residence for dinner, "Ivo, montes!" ("Ivo, come on up!"), which, in her Italian-accented French sounded like "Ivo, monta!," he adopted the stage name Yves Montand.

Montand's singing career was short-circuited by the start of World War II in September 1939. In 1940, he worked in the Marseilles shipyards as Germany overran northern France; he was not able to return to singing until the spring of 1941 under the German occupation. That fall, he first headlined his own vaudeville show in Nice, and he had his first screen appearance as an extra in La Prière aux Etoiles (Prayer to the Stars), shot in January 1942. But from March to October 1942, he had to work in a youth labor camp, as were all 20-year-old French males at the time. In February 1944, fearing that he would be forced to work for the Nazis, he left Marseilles and moved to Paris, where he began performing again