Elsa Lunghini

Origins and early life

Elsa Lunghini was born in the eighteenth arrondissement of Paris on 20 May 1973, daughter of the composer and photographer Georges Lunghini and of the painter and sculptor Christiane Jobert.

Work and career

Her place in this directory runs through her mother's family: Christiane Jobert is a sister of the actress Marlène Jobert, and both are daughters of Éliane Azulay, of the Sephardi Jewish community of Birkhadem, above Algiers — so the documented Jewish line is her maternal grandmother, and neither a surname nor a supposition. Her cousins are the actresses Eva Green and Joséphine Jobert. She began as a child actress at seven in Garde à vue in 1981, and at thirteen recorded T'en va pas, from the film La Femme de ma vie, which made her the youngest artist ever to reach number one in the French charts.

She sang under the single name Elsa from 1986 to 2007, with a run of hits that made her one of the emblematic voices of French pop of the late 1980s. She returned afterwards to acting, in television and on stage, while continuing to record occasionally.