Would his last albums have been premonitory? Two years after the release of the magnificent tube White Paradiseand a few months after his song never leave, Michael Berger died suddenly, at the age of 44, on August 2, 1992. On vacation in Ramatuelle, the singer who accumulated hits during his career, played a game of tennis with his friends, in particular the journalists Gérard and Marie-Françoise Holtz.
A few minutes later, he goes back to his house and has a heart attack, which will be fatal to him. Called on the spot, the doctors and the firefighters will then deliver a difficult sentence to his wife France Gall, who found him in the house: “We’re sorry, there’s nothing more we can do“. The collapsed singer, who had been married to the musician since 1976, finds herself alone with her two children and a career to pursue without the one with whom she has collaborated for more than twenty years.
A great fatigue that leads to drama
It must be said that Michel Berger was exhausted: according to the witnesses of that summer, including his mistress, Béatrice Grimm, the singer had difficulty supporting the production of his last duet album with France Gall, which had taken up a little too much space. his taste. Tired of a career that was beginning to tire him, the singer dreamed of other things, perhaps cinema or a career abroad, which would make him forget the loss of his two close friends, Daniel Balavoine and Coluche, both died in 1986.
Projects that he will therefore not have had time to carry out. And this drama, France Gall will struggle to recover: affected by cancer a few months after the death of her husband, she then saw her daughter, Pauline, fly away, affected by cystic fibrosis and who ended up dying in 1997 , at only 19 years old. Difficult for the singer to recover from it, she who had already seen one of her ex-companions, Claude François, die suddenly.
Thirty years after his death, Michel Berger has never been forgotten: regularly taken up by the younger generation, he had been the subject of a musical, entitled resist and which included all of his greatest hits. And after 25 years of living without him, France Gall ended up joining him: in early 2018, the singer died at the age of 70, succumbing to cancer.