There's a chase in which she plays Godzilla (upright, with claws), and Marcel, her son with French actor and director Guillaume Canet, squeals with delight.
The stars are Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson, but the film belongs to Marcel – her script an expert confection, a masterclass in narrative structure.
Marcel, her future husband, worked a few hundred feet under her, in the dark bowels of the earth.
It charts her many affairs, most famously with boxer Marcel Cerdan, her total dependence on the adrenalin of performance, and her even greater reliance on booze and drugs.
There was also a sold-out musical, at the Théâtre Marigny, "Piaf, A Life in Pink and Black," starring Nathalie Lhermitte, who got the audience up and singing; "Moi pour Toi," an edition of Piaf's correspondence with the middleweight world boxing champion Marcel Cerdan, her true love; a comic book illustrating her lyrics; and a special Piaf photo supplement to Paris Match.
In "Within a Budding Grove," the second volume of Proust's "In Search of Lost Time," there is a passage in which Mme Swann emerges from a long winter, during which Marcel glimpses her, from the street, cloaked in ermine in her frigid home as she receives visitors.
Or the moment when a particularly dangerous client, Marcel, tells her to leave them on as she undresses.
There's no question that Tarantino wants us to cheer when Shoshanna Dreyfuss and her lover Marcel burn down her movie theater, trapping Hitler and his fellow Nazis inside.
Her previously loose and tawny hair is now marcelled and peroxide blond; her glittering but shapeless black gown projects the expensive glamour of a society matron.
And while she may look china-doll perfect, her hair marcelled into immobile waves, he is quick to observe, as he gazes into her eyes, that she has a flaw in her iris.
She has a string of imitators, most prominently Katy Perry, who has unabashedly appropriated Ms. Von Teese's femme fatale persona, down to her loosely marcelled waves and winged eyeliner.
