Some of Dutronc's best-known hits include "Il est cinq heures, Paris s'éveille" (which AllMusic has called "his finest hour"),[1] "Le Responsable",[2] and "Les Cactus".

Jacques Dutronc was born on 28 April 1943 at 67 Rue de Provence in the 9th arrondissement of Paris, the home of his parents, Pierre and Madeleine.

[6] In 1960, Dutronc formed a band with himself as guitarist, schoolfriend Hadi Kalafate as bassist, Charlot Bénaroch as drummer (later replaced with André Crudot) and Daniel Dray as singer.

[8] After being discharged from the army in 1963, Dutronc briefly played guitar in Eddy Mitchell's backing band and was also given a job at Vogue as Jacques Wolfsohn's assistant.

Wolfsohn asked Dutronc to work with Jacques Lanzmann, a novelist and editor of Lui magazine, to create songs for a beatnik singer called Benjamin.

[13] Dutronc's self-titled debut album, released at the end of 1966, sold over a million copies and was awarded a special Grand Prix du Disque by the Académie Charles Cros, in memoriam of one of its founders.

During that period, he released seven hit albums and more than 20 singles, including two further number ones: "J'aime les filles" in 1967 and "Il est cinq heures, Paris s'éveille" in 1968.

[16] According to music critic Mark Deming: "Dutronc's early hits were rough but clever exercises in European garage rock ... like Dutronc's role models Bob Dylan and Ray Davies, he could write melodies strong enough to work even without their excellent lyrics, and his band had more than enough energy to make them fly (and the imagination to move with the musical times as psychedelia and hard rock entered the picture at the end of the decade)".

In the following years, Dutronc devoted most of his energies toward his acting career, appearing in films directed by Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Lelouch and Maurice Pialat.

[17] Steven Spielberg reportedly considered Dutronc to be the best French actor of his generation, and had the role of René Belloq in Raiders of the Lost Ark written with him in mind.

[20] The resulting album, Guerre et pets ("War and Farts" – a play on the title of Tolstoy's novel), consequently only includes two Lanzmann-Dutronc compositions, and is mainly written by Dutronc and Gainsbourg.

The follow-up, 1982's C'est pas du bronze, was written with Anne Ségalen, by now divorced from Jacques Lanzmann, and was released to a frosty critical reception.

Most of the songs were written by Dutronc without a partner, although he collaborated with Etienne Daho on one track and with Jean-François Bernardini of the Corsican folk group I Muvrini on another.

[22] During the 1990s, Dutronc appeared in two films by Patrick Grandperret and was nominated for a César Award for best supporting actor in 1999, for his role in Nicole Garcia's Place Vendôme.

[29] In November 2014, Dutronc performed a series of concerts with Eddy Mitchell and Johnny Hallyday at Paris Bercy, under the name "Les vieilles canailles" ("The Old Gits").

[31] In 1991, "Il est cinq heures, Paris s'éveille" was voted the best French-language single of all time in a poll of music critics organised by Le Nouvel Observateur for a TV special broadcast on Antenne 2, beating Jacques Brel's "Ne me quitte pas" into second place.

[32][33] Dutronc's songs have been covered by Matthieu Chedid, Vanessa Paradis, Mungo Jerry, Etienne Daho, Sylvie Vartan, Miles Kane, the Divine Comedy, Serge Gainsbourg, Black Lips, Zine, the Last Shadow Puppets among others.