It can be said that Edith Piaf, the French singing sensation who rose from a life of poverty and a footloose existence to become an internationally known chanteuse and actress, lived life on her own terms. Indeed, one of her most famous songs was “Non, je ne regrette rien” (“I regret nothing”). Though the song is more than 60 years old, its message is timeless. The Allstate insurance company even featured it in a TV commercial that touted the financial rewards of smooth driving and good automobile coverage. The "no regrets" philosophy may have summarized Piaf’s own approach to living with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), among other illnesses.

Piaf’s Early Childhood and Illness

Piaf was born Edith Giovanna Gassion in 1915 in the Belleville neighborhood of Paris to a mother who soon abandoned her; she lived with her maternal grandmother and then with her paternal grandmother in the latter's brothel. Her father was a skilled street acrobat and circus performer. As a teenager, Piaf would sing on the Parisian streets for money.

Illness was an ongoing issue for Piaf. A childhood corneal infection gave her poor eyesight. She later dealt, at 17, with the stress of having a child, a daughter who died of meningitis at 2. “It was one of the rottenest times we ever went through,” wrote her friend Simone Berteaut, who would collect money from passersby as Piaf sang in the street.

Soon after she lost her child, the Parisian nightclub owner Louis Leplée discovered the singer and hired her, then 20, to perform at his establishment. Leplée gave her the stage surname Piaf, meaning “sparrow.”

Getting Diagnosed With Rheumatoid Arthritis, Becoming a Celebrity

As a performer, Piaf met many admirers, and she cultivated relationships with the playwright Jean Cocteau and the poet Jacques Bourgeat, as well as many singers of the era whom she mentored and dated. Carolyn Burke, who wrote the book No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf, noted that the love of her life was the married French boxer Marcel Cerdan, whom she met in 1948. But when Cerdan died in a plane crash en route to visit Piaf a year later, the singer began using painkillers such as morphine to deal with the pain of rheumatoid arthritis, diagnosed around the same time. By the mid-1950s, after several car accidents, her painkiller use had become an addiction.

Dealing With Joint Pain, Stiffness, and Other RA Symptoms

As Burke wrote in an article for the Telegraph, “Certainly, she was already a drinker — and had been sent to a clinic for aversion therapy — but it is clear that at this stage, she also drank as a kind of self-medication for her arthritic pain. The result was that the damage to her liver hastened the onset of aging, so that by the late 1950s, she looked 20 years older than she actually was.”

In Addition to RA, Piaf Dealt With Numerous Other Health Challenges

The alcohol and drug use helped Piaf cope with muiltiple illnesses, which included malnutrition, ulcers, tuberculosis, pancreatitis, hepatitis, and finally, liver cancer in addition to rheumatoid arthritis, according to an article published in The New Yorker.

Unfortunately, Piaf’s addictions likely contributed to, or even caused, her early death at age 47 from what was reported to be liver cancer.

In addition to acting and singing, Piaf wrote two books about her dramatic life, Au bal de la chance (“The Wheel of Fortune”) in 1958 and Ma Vie ("My Life"), which was published in 1964, after her death.

“I’ve had an irresistible need to destroy myself,” she said shortly before her death in 1963. Writing in The New Yorker, Judith Thurman called Piaf "probably the best-known and best-loved popular singer in French history, and one of the few to become a household name in America." Free of the pain she suffered in life, Piaf’s voice lives on, decades later, particularly in another one of her songs, “La Vie en Rose,” which became the title of the 2007 Piaf biopic for which Marion Cotillard won an Academy Award for Best Actress.