Great European Lives

Remembering Conny Plank, the music producer who helped define an essentially European sound. There are music producers who become famous in their own right. Joe Meek, Rick Rubin, Jerry Wexler, Stephen Street, Quincy Jones: most of us could probably reel off a list of mixing desk maestros who have helped change or define the sound […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on the life of Andrei Sakharov – a hero of the USSR who became one of its fiercest critics. On the day he died Andrei Sakharov had spent many hours in the Supreme Soviet, making his case with a characteristic combination of passionate enthusiasm and forensically detailed argument. While he welcomed the perestroika measures introduced by […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY profiles the thinker Hannah Arendt. In 1960 Hannah Arendt noticed that Adolf Eichmann, one of the key architects of the Holocaust, was due to stand trial in Israel the following year. A decade earlier Arendt had published her groundbreaking book Origins of Totalitarianism, in which she examined the roots in anti-Semitism and 19th […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on the extraordinary life and tragic death of Hélène Boucher. Yermenonville is a small village to the west of Paris, home to no more than 600 people. Its cemetery is typical of small churchyards across Europe: small, walled, and with headstones of various vintage where you’ll come across the same three or four surnames dating […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on the actress María Casares, wrenched from a privileged, happy childhood, to the uncertainty of a life in exile and a career characterised by a constant desire to challenge herself. María Casares could never be accused of making things easy for herself. Renowned as one of the great tragediennes of the European stage and […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on Rene Goscinny, the French comic editor and writer, who co-created the Astérix comic book series. On January 20 this year a statue was unveiled in Paris on a patch of grass near the junction of Rue de Boulainvilliers and Rue Singer. It’s unassuming, some might say underwhelming: a podgy middle-aged man in […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on the poet responsible for a tragically slim collection of some of the finest verse in the English language. One hundred years ago this week a slim hardback volume of poetry was published in London by Chatto & Windus. Six shillings bought you a collection of 23 poems and a portrait of their […]

For all his brilliance on the bike, Jacques Anquetil remained a remote rider. CHARLIE CONNELLY reports. The 1964 Tour de France was the first broadcast live on television. Until then, watching the Tour had involved standing at the roadside waiting for the riders to flash past in a whirring, panting blur of colour. Now, viewers […]

Charlie Connelly looks at the life of Henry Dunant. In 1859 Henry Dunant was in a state of excitement. A decade earlier the 31-year-old Swiss had completed his education with modest results and joined a bank, apparently destined for an unspectacular career in currency exchange before an 1853 business trip to North Africa opened up […]

It was a cold evening in Paris on February 12, 1926, when the cream of city society made their way to the Salle des Agriculteurs on Rue d’Athènes, all cloche hats, fox furs, buttonhole carnations and clouded breath. When the doors had closed and everyone was seated, the lights dimmed and applause drowned out the […]

The screaming sounded otherworldly, inhuman even, and drew people living on the Ile Saint-Louis on the Seine in the centre of Paris to their windows. After a while they saw two burly men in caps and overalls struggling in the doorway of one of the apartment buildings, trying to wrestle a middle-aged woman towards a […]

They made a curious trio, sitting around a table in the Chez Carrere nightclub just off the Champs Elysées sipping champagne and making smalltalk. There was the young woman, barely a month after her 22nd birthday, in a blue evening dress, white pearl necklace and white fur cape alongside her husband of six months, a […]

“I am not trying to boast, but I have to admit that for an uneducated son of an immigrant I could have done far worse,” said Charles Aznavour. Those born without privilege tend to appreciate success more than those on whom privilege is bestowed. Raised without a safety net they are also conscious of how […]

“Dio mio, you Americans are crazy. Fly six, eight thousand miles. Talk to Magnani. Why? I cannot win Academy Award. Is impossible.” It was the early spring of 1956 and Anna Magnani had just set Hollywood alight with her performance as Serafina Delle Rose in a screen adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ The Rose Tattoo the […]

The winter of 1909 came early to Russia. One morning, in the house on her family estate at Neskuchnoye in what is now Kharkiv, Ukraine, Zinaida Serebriakova looked out of the window at the snowy landscape then sat down at her dressing table. Bare-shouldered, she was grateful for the fire burning in the hearth. When […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY explores the life of Georgi Markov – the dissident Bulgarian writer who was assassinated in London. At 10.30pm On September 7, 1978, Georgi Markov arrived at his home in Clapham, south London, after a long shift at the BBC World Service. He was due to return to work early the next morning and […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on the great life of soviet Russian-American actress and author Victoria Fyodorova. ‘For all I knew Poludino was the world, and was like every other place in the world,’ wrote Victoria Fyodorova of the village in northern Kazakhstan where she grew up with her mother Alexandra, a brother Yuri, ten years older, and […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY explores the life of the legendary Polish footballer. The summer of 1978 saw an unfamiliar frisson of glamour shimmer through English football. The FA had lifted their archaic two-year residency requirement for overseas players, paving the way for Argentinean World Cup winners Osvaldo Ardiles and Ricardo Villa to arrive at Tottenham Hotspur and […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY looks back at the life of Soviet and Russian singer and songwriter, Viktor Tsoi. During an interview in November 2012 Mikhail Gorbachev recalled the moment in 1985 when, on the death of his predecessor Konstantin Chernenko, he became leader of the Soviet Union: ‘The cardiologist telephoned me and said, ‘Mikhail Sergeevich, Konstantin Ustinovich […]

Disco versions of the Sex Pistols, topless dancers and a singing dog – CHARLIE CONNELLY looks at the life of the outrageous vocalist. There was a glorious anarchy to the New Wave Vaudeville Show that ran over four nights in November 1978 at the Irving Plaza in Manhattan’s East Village. The building was between uses: […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on the life of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn – the face of resistance to Soviet state oppression. He looked apprehensive in the doorway of the Alaskan Air jet that had just landed in Magadan, on the Sea of Okhotsk in eastern Siberia, from Anchorage. His eyes darted from side to side as the wind toyed […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on the concert pianist and composer whose star shone brightly but briefly. The summer of 1831 brought cholera to St Petersburg. It was in the Neva and the canals, it was in the wells and the culverts. The first cases were reported in early June and within days the daily death rate was […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY looks back on the life of influential German writer Heinrich Boll. It was a dark, chilly February evening when Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn arrived at a remote house in the shadow of the Eifel Hills an hour southwest of Cologne on February 13, 1974. Almost exactly 24 hours earlier the dissident writer had been arrested […]

Once called ‘the face of France’, Moulin was able to unite the FRench resistance and political groups. CHARLIE CONNELLY reports on his triumphs and tragedies. The morning of December 19, 1964, heralded one of those cold Parisian days when the chill seeps right through to the bone. André Malraux, novelist and minister for cultural affairs, […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on Bud Spencer, the Italian movie star and much-loved gunslinger. On a wide, busy pedestrian shopping street in the south-east of Budapest there is a statue. Eight feet high in bronze, it depicts a burly, smiling figure in an open-necked shirt carrying a saddle on his shoulder with a six-gun sitting in a […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on Jacqueline Audry, the iconic French film-maker who subverted post-war cinema Jacqueline Audry’s films were sumptuous. At her peak during the 1950s she produced a succession of costume dramas set during the Belle Époque, most of them adaptations from novels in which the rustle of taffeta began as the opening credits faded and […]

Distracted by grief and anger following his brother’s terrible accident, Bottechhia overcame more struggles than war to become a cycling legend. CHARLIE CONNELLY reports. 21st July 1925: Ottavio Bottecchia of Italy chases Lucien Buysse of Belgium through St Cloud during the final stage of the 1925 Tour de France. Bottecchia went on to win and […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY profiles the fencer, violinist and revolutionary commanded of the French Garde Nationale. On April 9, 1787, at the behest of the Prince of Wales, an unusual fencing match took place in London between Mademoiselle d’Eon, a French former diplomat and spy who lived as a woman for decades, and Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY looks back on the life of Spanish singer, Rocío Jurado. The Spanish singer Rocio Jurado at home, 1976, Madrid, Castilla La Mancha, Spain. (Photo by Gianni Ferrari/Cover/Getty Images). – Credit: Getty Images One evening in December 2005 Rocío Jurado lay on a couch in a dressing room at the Madrid studios of the […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY looks back on the life of Giovanni Falcone who played an instrumental role in bringing down the mafia. One hot Sicilian night in July 2017 somebody attacked a statue in a piazza in the poor San Filippo Neri neighbourhood of Palermo. They meant business too. It took a determined effort to knock the […]

CHARLIE CONNELLY on the Hungarian-Spanish escapee-turned-footballer, László Kubala. It was cold in the back of the truck and the ill-fitting uniform wasn’t providing much protection against the January chill. The engine whined and coughed as the old lorry wheezed its way towards the border, hitting every pothole and causing the men sitting in the back […]

Charlie Connelly explores the life of Italian film director, producer and screenwriter, Sergio Leone. Few directors can claim to have redefined a single genre more than Sergio Leone. Between 1964 and 1971 he made five westerns, films that rendered everything that had gone before immediately obsolete and maintain a tangible influence on everything made since. […]