Edith Piaf – lovingly known as ‘The Sparrow’ because she was only 1.4m tall – is the darling of the French. Even now, more than 40 years after she died, mention of her name brings tears to the eyes of many French people. Nobody can measure up to her. She was the French singer; she was France, a France without marketing, promotion, a hit parade...simply talent and, above all, passion.

Legend has it that Edith Piaf was born under a lamp-post in the rue de Belleville, a lively working-class district in Paris's 20th arondissement.

But her birth on 19 December 1915 was decidedly less dramatic - it appears far more probable that Edith's mother gave birth to her baby in a local hospital, the address registered on her official birth certificate.

Edith had a rather lonely childhood. Her father earnt his living as a street acrobat and was rarely at home and her mother spent little time with her child either - she was pre-occupied with launching a career as a singer on the local cabaret circuit. More often than not Edith was left in the care of her Algerian grandmother. The family's fortunes deteriorated during the First World War when Edith’s father left Belleville to serve at the front and her mother was forced to earn her living singing on street corners. Edith was left to her own devices, and generally ran wild with other children in the neighbourhood.

But when Edith’s father returned from the war two years later, he decided to send his daughter to live with his mother in Normandy. Edith would spend the happiest years of her childhood growing up amidst farm animals in the countryside. But this country idyll soon came to an end when the young girl returned to Paris to live with her father and joined him in his street act and while he performed, Edith passed the hat around the assembled crowd.

But Edith soon developed her own act. Discovering that she had a powerful singing voice which could hold a crowd mesmerised for longer than her father's acrobats, Edith decided to follow in her mother's footsteps. At the age of 15 she left her father and began singing on the Paris streets while her half-sister Simone, known as Momone, passed the hat round. In spite of her scruffy street urchin appearance, Edith proved extremely popular with the crowds, her amazingly expressive voice managing to move even the most impassive listener. In 1932, at the age of 17, Edith fell in love with Louis Dupont, a local man known on the streets of Belleville as P'tit Louis. By the following year Edith had fallen pregnant and given birth to a daughter, Marcelle. Raising the child in a small apartment with barely enough money to pay for heating was hard, but Edith made a serious effort to be a good mother. She was devastated when Marcelle died of meningitis just after her second birthday.

After the death of her daughter Edith returned to the streets, singing in the squares and cafes around Belleville, then venturing up to the cabaret area around Pigalle. Edith was performing her act one cold and windy afternoon on a street corner in Pigalle when Louis Leplée, the director of a cabaret on the Champs Elysées happened to walk by. Stopping to watch Edith's act, Leplée was absolutely bowled over by the young singer's voice and offered her a job on the spot. So it was that Edith was plucked off the streets, thrown into a chic little black dress and made resident singer of Le Gerny's, one of the most elegant cabarets on the Champs Elysées. It was Leplée who invented Edith's famous stage name, billing his new singer as La Môme Piaf (which in street slang meant little sparrow - a perfect name for Leplée’s tiny, fragile-looking protegée).

But while Edith might have appeared tiny and fragile, when the she appeared on stage she seemed to tower above her 1.4m, exerting an extraordinary power over her audience with her raw emotional, vocals. This unknown street singer proved an immediate hit with chic Paris audiences and Le Gerny's was soon full of French celebrities who flocked to the Champs Elysées to hear La Môme Piaf sing. Encouraged by this overnight success, in 1936 Leplée arranged for Edith to make a recording of ‘Les Mômes de la cloche’. Then, just as her career was on the point of taking off tragedy struck: Leplée was murdered in his home in April of that year and she, together with many other of Leplée’s Pigalle 'underworld' connections, was called in for questioning. But Edith somehow managed to survive the scandal and within several months she had her career up and running again with the help of a man named Raymond Asso, a former legionnaire who had decided to make a career for himself in the Paris music world. He was totally besotted by Edith and devoted all his time and energy to helping her perfect her stage act.

During the Second World War, Edith and Simone took up residence above a brothel frequented by German soldiers. Edith was accused of being too friendly with the Germans or possibly collaborating with them, but she also dated a Jewish pianist during this time and co-wrote a subtle protest song with Simone. According to one story, singing for high-ranking Germans at the One Two Two Club earned her the right to pose for photographs with French prisoners of war, to boost their morale. The Frenchmen were supposedly able to cut out their photos and use them as forged passport photos and some of them managed to escape.

Edith Piaf died on the French Riviera of liver cancer on 11 October 1963 at the age of 47.