Greco, Juliette (1927– )

French singer. She was part of the avant-garde Left Bank café culture of Paris after World War II, singing songs with lyrics by Jacques Prévert and music by Joseph Kosma (1905–1969), such as ‘Les Feuilles mortes’ (1947). She appeared in many films, including Jean Cocteau's Orphée (1949) and Jean Renoir's Eléna et les Hommes (1955). In the 1960s she sang songs by Serge Gainsbourg (1928–1991) and Jacques Brel.

Following the arrest of her mother, a member of the French Resistance in the Dordogne, she went to Paris in 1943, and became hostess of the all-night basement bistro, Le Tabou, on the rue Dauphine, in 1946. In the 1940s Greco was regarded as the ‘muse of existentialism’. Her circle included the writers and philosophers Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. She began to tour all over the world in the 1950s, and appeared in several films directed by Darryl F Zanuck, such as The Sun Also Rises (1957). Her autobiography Jujube was published in 1982.