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Description

Johnny Hallyday (born Jean-Philippe Léo Smet on June 15, 1943, in Paris) is a French singer, performer, and actor. In 2009, after 50 years in the business, Johnny Hallyday remains one of the most famous French-speaking singers. His sales are around 60 million copies in France alone. He has received 39 gold records, 18 platinum records, and 7 Victoires de la Musique awards. 26 million spectators have attended his concerts during 100 tours in France and Europe. He is one of the most visible personalities in the French media landscape. In his early days, during the Yéyé period (the sixties), Johnny Hallyday established a repertoire inspired by and adapted from his American idols. He has recorded some 1,000 songs, including 250 adaptations (a quarter of his discography); he also composed just over a hundred of his own songs. His work is marked by a powerful voice, a real stage presence, and elaborate staging. Like most French-speaking singers and musicians, his international career has never really been a success. Despite a few concerts abroad in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as a concert in Las Vegas in 1996, he is virtually unknown to the general public outside the French-speaking world. On December 2, 2007, he announced on TF1's 8 p.m. news that the Tour 66, scheduled for 2009, would be his last tour. He stated, "I have too much respect for the public not to be too old to go on stage. I wouldn't want to become pathetic." This tour included stops in Madagascar and Vietnam, these two concerts having humanitarian purposes, as they were given for the benefit of UNICEF (of which his wife Læticia is a patron) and to finance an orphanage.