[8] Credited for his strong voice and his spectacular shows, he sometimes arrived by entering a stadium through the crowd and once by jumping from a helicopter above the Stade de France, where he performed 9 times.

Usually working with the best French artists and musicians of his time, he collaborated with Charles Aznavour, Michel Berger and Jean-Jacques Goldman.

Hugely popular in France, he was referred to as simply "Johnny" and seen as a "national monument"[citation needed] and a part of the French cultural legacy.

He remained relatively unknown in the English-speaking world, where he was dubbed "the biggest rock star you've never heard of" and introduced as the French version of Elvis Presley.

[11] Hallyday grew up with his aunt, Hélène Mar,[12] and took his stage name from a cousin-in-law from Oklahoma (Lemoine Ketcham) who performed as Lee Halliday.

[19] At the end of the 1960s, Hallyday made a string of albums with Foreigner's Mick Jones[20] and Tommy Brown as musical directors, and Big Jim Sullivan, Bobby Graham and Jimmy Page as session musicians.

These are Jeune homme, Rivière... Ouvre ton lit (also known as Je suis né dans la rue) and Vie.

On Je suis né dans la rue, Hallyday hired both Peter Frampton and the Small Faces and they all play on most of the tracks on the album.

"Amen" is a French-language variation on "That Man", a previously-released 1967 Small Faces song played in a heavy rock style.

Later Hallyday released two live albums, On Stage and Born Rocker Tour (a recording of his 70th anniversary concerts in Bercy and Theatre de Paris).

The couple adopted two girls from Vietnam: Jade Odette Désirée, born 3 August 2004 (formerly Bùi Thị Hoà), in November 2004,[33] and Joy in 2008.

Hallyday, who resided in Los Angeles, owned a chalet in the Swiss town of Gstaad from 2006 to 2015 to avoid the high tax rate imposed by the French government.

[36] One of his favourite leisure activities was riding his Harley-Davidson on long trips through the California desert, staying in small motels along the way.

Doctors announced that they had put Hallyday into a medically-induced coma so they could repair lesions that had formed as a result of the surgery, and to relieve his pain.

On 17 December 2009, Hallyday and his wife started legal proceedings against Stephane Delajoux, the doctor who had performed the original surgery.

[50][51] The Daily Beast described Hallyday as "a hip swiveling, leather-clad Gallic answer to Elvis Presley who shook up his home country's music scene with American-style rock-n-roll and bad-boy antics.