Herbert Léonard, the interpreter of for pleasure, died on Sunday March 2, 2025 at the age of 80. He suffered from a disease and had already experienced health concerns a few years ago.
A name and a song known to everyone: Herbert Léonard and his tube For pleasurereleased in 1981 and even popular decades later. The singer died on Sunday March 2, 2025 at Fontainebleau hospital announced his wife, Cléo, to AFP, he was 80 years old. “He had been fighting for some time against lung cancer,” said the one who has shared the artist’s life for 57 years.
Herbert Léonard had communicated very little about his illness, even with his relatives, including the host Julien Lepers who had written the famous song to him For pleasure and several others. “I called him every week since I knew he was sick, just over a month ago,” said the former host of the show Question for a champion with Parisian. The two men had seen themselves “a few weeks” to shoot the episode of the show Chez Jordan Deluxe broadcast on February 20 on C8. “I got it 6 or 7 days ago, he told me that he felt very weak. […] He knew himself sick and fragile, he was very, very lucid. He knew that his time was counted, he told me, “added the host describing the singer’s state a few days before his death.
The interpreter of For fun, Who released a final album in 2014, had also announced the cancellation of a “gala” in which he was to participate on February 22 in the Bas-Rhin evoking a “little health concern”. However, he had reassured his audience giving him an appointment “very soon” and specifying that it was “nothing serious”. Herbert Léonard died nine days later.
Herbert Léonard was a “miracle”
Herbert Léonard died at the age of 80, but his life could have stopped much earlier. The singer described himself as a “miraculous” after having escaped death twice. He had survived a very serious car accident in 1969: a road trip when he was not attached and during which he crossed the windshield. The singer had been disfigured and forced to withdraw from the scene for long months. “I was unstable for a year. I passed under a truck. I had taken the whole wheel and the windshield in the figure, so I looked like Frankenstein,” he explained at the time to remember AFP.
The French singer had also defeated the disease in 2017, which had already attacked his lungs. The 72-year-old artist, suffered from a lightning lung infection that had plunged him into a coma for thirty-two days. After waking up, Herbert Léonard considered himself “miracle” and had denounced the misdeeds of cigarettes. “It’s been forty-five years since I smoked. And I would like to tell everyone to quit smoking. Now, obviously, I will not smoke anymore. It happened that I lacked air one evening. I could no longer breathe. There was no other solution than to call the gendarmes who brought the Samu. I found myself, therefore, in this resuscitation unit at Melun hospital” RTL.
It was finally after a career started in the 1960s in several rock groups, then as a solo singer of French variety, passing by author of works on aviation, in particular the Russian aviation of which he had become an expert, that Herbert Léonard was left.