Special Guest Blogger: Maurice Chevalier

I didn't have the best of starts, by the time i was 10 my father had left, my mum was in hospital and my elder brother decided that looking after me was too much trouble and moved out so i did the only thing i could and dropped out of school to become an acrobat.
I was pretty good at it too but acrobat is not the safest career choice and i rolled when i should have tucked and landed on my head and injured my spine which meant i had to hang up my leotard before my 11th Birthday but fortunately the local mattress factory had no qualms about taking on a boy to work a dangerous machine and the dangerous machine had no qualms about crushing the finger of a boy so i dragged my broken finger and crumpled spine along to an interview for a singer at a local cafe.
The crowd liked me and i got noticed by a singer called Fréhel who was quite a big name then and she introduced me to her bedroom, her drug habit and larger venues and then some other big names in that order including the very famous singer Mistinguett who offered to take me under her wing and give me a well rounded education and not only in showbiz.
We became a double act in every way imaginable and things were going well until Kaiser Wilhem stuck his big nose into things and i was drafted into the French Army and found myself on the WW1 front lines and suffered a serious shrapnel wound to the lung, was captured and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp for 26 months.
On my release i returned to the stage but struggled to get back into my groove until a dancer called Yvonne Vallée took me on to be her dance partner and something a little more intimate.
We got married and eight years later divorced to marry a dancer, Nita Raya, who i later found out was Jewish which in 1939 France was a bit of a problem for the invading Germans who agreed to not murder her horribly if i agreed to play for them in Berlin. The Germans tended to get a bit shooty at the word 'No' so i agreed if they released 10 French POW's which they did and i returned to France expecting a hero's welcome but instead got death threats from the French resistance.
I moved to Hollywood and made some films where i was bizarrely asked to performing in English with a heavy fake French accent, a Frenchman speaking English in a fake French accent.
After another divorce, marriage and divorce i spent most of the 60's touring and suffering from depression which got so bad i tried to overdose on barbiturates but it didn't kill me but badly damaged my liver and kidney's and i later died after an unsuccessful kidney operation.
Life gave me lots of citron's but i took them and made limonade. I read that one on a can of French lemonade once. I like to think it applies to life.