Living legend Aznavour to attend Wong Kar Wai’s Lumière Award Ceremony

The Lumière film classics festival has invited 93-year-old entertainer Charles Aznavour as a special guest at Friday's award ceremony for Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai. It will serve as a warm-up for Aznavour who starts a six-venue concert tour in Lyon, where the film festival is taking place, on 20 January 2018.

Cover of a book by Vincent Perrot and Charles Aznavour, published in 2015 by Editions de la Martinière

Franco-Armenian Aznavour is a living legend, a world away from Wong Kar Wai perhaps but probably better known to many French people.

His singing career has brought him wider international fame than his film career. He has sung in at least three languages, and made his name in the English-speaking world with songs like She, written in 1974 with Herbert Kretzmer.

Aznavour is also part of film history, having in about 80 films, for both cinema and television, including playing a Jewish shopkeeper in Volker Schlöndorff’s 1979 award-winning The Tin Drum and himself in Claude Lelouch’s 1983 Edith et Marcel.

The Lumière Festival is screening the 1961 Un Taxi pour Tobrouk directed by Denys de La Patellière on Saturday. Aznavour, who plays Samuel Goldman alongside Lino Ventura and Hardy Kruger, is to introduce the film, which is set in World War II, to the audience.