Jacques, Paris, France. Vanessa Paradis was a teen pop sensation in her native France in the s. At the age of 14 she recorded a pop single about a Paris taxi driver, titled "Joe le Taxi," which spent eleven weeks at at the number one spot in France and became an international smash hit as well. In the United States, however, Paradis is better known as the partner of actor Johnny Depp, with whom she has two children. A writer for the London newspaper Independent Sunday described her as a "French sex kitten of sub-[Brigitte] Bardot variety, endowed with mysterious superstarlet status despite infrequency of international bits.
Her parents ran an interior design business, and her uncle, Didier Pain, was an actor who moved on to record producing. Thanks to Pain, she won a spot on a television talent showcase at the age of seven, singing a song called "Emilie Jolie. He penned a song about a Parisian taxi driver for Paradis, and "Joe le Taxi" swept the French pop charts in It also reached number one in 13 other countrieseven in Britain, where French-language tracks rarely do that well on the charts.
An Independent Sunday assessment some years later described the song as a "candied rendition" that the then-teenager "pouted her way" through, but at the time, taxi drivers across Europe named their vehicles "Joey" in homage to the song. Her young, vixenish looks made her a star, but the sudden fame also made her a virtual outcast at the Paris school she attended as a teen.
She was roundly slammed in the press and even jeered at in public. It seemed even odder when she considered her country's history of producing sugary pop ditties sung by kittenish teenaged girls. It's a human thing. Despite the honor, she suffered renewed public criticism.
It was a shock. I never understood why. They would write 'slut' on the walls of my house and call me names. The record was thoroughly dance-pop, save for a cover of the Lou Reed classic "Walk on the Wild Side. She was signed by Chanel as a spokesmodel for its Coco fragrance in , with an ad that featured her dressed as an exotic caged bird. Romantically linked with rocker Lenny Kravitz by then, she began to learn English in preparation for her self-titled English-language debut album in A critic for Time found that "even [the] best songs have a predictable, surface appeal.
