| Name |
Mireille Mathieu |
| Height |
|
| Naionality |
French |
| Date of Birth |
22-July-1946 |
| Place of Birth |
Avignon, Vaucluse, France |
| Famous for |
Singing |
Mireille Mathieu was born and raised in Avignon, Vaucluse department, France, the eldest daughter of a family of fourteen children; the youngest brother was born after she moved to Paris. Her father Roger's family was from Avignon, and her mother Marcelle-Sophie née Poirier came to Avignon from Dunkirk in 1944 as a refugee from World War II, after her sister and mother died. Roger, with his father Arcade, ran a stonemason shop outside the Saint Veran Cemetery in Avignon, which is still in business. The family lived in poverty, and was dependent on government housing.
Roger once dreamed of becoming a singer, but his father Arcade disapproved, inspiring him to have one of his children learn to sing with him in church. Mireille included his operatic voice on her 1968 Christmas album, where it was mixed in with the Minuit Chretiens song. Mireille's first paid performance before an audience, at age four, was rewarded with a lollipop. A defining moment was seeing Edith Piaf sing on television.
Mireille performed poorly in elementary school due to dyslexia, requiring an extra year to graduate. Born left handed, her teachers used a ruler to strike her hand each time she was caught writing with it. She became right handed, although her left hand remains quite animated while singing. She has a fantastic memory, and never uses a prompter on stage. Abandoning higher education, she began work in a local factory in Montfavet at age fourteen (1960), where she helped with the family income and paid for singing lessons. Popular at work, she often sang songs at lunch, or while working. Like her parents, she is a short woman at 1.52 m (5 feet) in height. Her sister Monique began work at the same factory a few months later, both given bicycles on credit to commute with, making for very long days, and many bad memories of riding against the Mistral winds. The factory went out of business, so Mireille and her two oldest sisters (Monique, and Christiane) became youth counselors for the summer before her rise to fame, a summer where she had her fortune told by Tarot cards by an old Gypsy woman, saying she would soon mingle with Kings and Queens.
Mireille is Roman Catholic, and her patron Saint is Saint Rita, the Saint for the Impossible. Mireille's paternal grandmother Germaine nee Charreton, assured her that Saint Rita was the one to pray to for hopeless cases. Beyond religion, like many artists, she is unabashed about superstition and luck. She has stage fright, and can be seen making the sign of the cross before moving out on stage.
