Isabelle Aubret

The winner of the 1962 Eurovision Song Contest for her home country, France, Isabelle Aubret was born Thérèse Coquerelle in Lille on July 27, 1938. A promising gymnast as a child, she won the French national championships in 1952 but, by her late teens, she had turned her attention to singing. Discovered by the music director of a local radio station, she was recruited as featured vocalist to a Le Havre orchestra and, in 1960, she won a singing competition at the Paris Olympia. There she came under the wing of the hall's director, Bruno Coquatrix, who secured her a cabaret spo...