Popular singer and respected aviation writer Herbert Leonard passes at age 80

[TomcatViP]

Beloved singer and unparalleled French aerospace historian/writer died yesterday, the 2nd of March 2025, at 80 after a long battle with cancer:

"Herbert est décédé à 18 heures, à l'hôpital de Fontainebleau. Il luttait depuis quelque temps contre un cancer du poumon", a-t-elle précisé à l'AFP.
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"Herbert died at 6 p.m. at the Fontainebleau hospital. He had been battling lung cancer for some time," she told AFP.

For those that are unfamiliar with his top selling history of Soviet and German aircraft, might you find in the below titles a glimpse of what was his talent as professional researcher and writer of reference for WWII literature:

Décès d’Herbert Léonard, qui « luttait contre un cancer du poumon », à l’âge de 80 ans

Crooner à la française, Herbert Léonard, décédé dimanche à l’âge de 80 ans, a connu dans les années 80 un immense succès avec des tubes comme « Pour le plaisir » et « Quand tu m’aimes », aux paroles parfois suggestives.

www.letelegramme.fr

I had been a satisfied owner of both his books on the Stuka and Pe-2 as soon as they were released, never regretting the expense (that were fairly sympathetically priced at the time of their release, I must add).

If my memory stands right, you can also find an excellent series of article on the Yack aircrafts (7 to 11) that he authored in Le Fana.

Other will also certainly comment better than me on his quite successful Pop singer career.

May he rest in Peace.

 

[Stargazer]

French aviation writer Herbert Léonard (real name: Hubert Lœnhardt) died on March 2, 2025 at age 80. Although he was mostly known of the general public as a singer, he had a lifelong passion for aviation, and particularly WW2 Soviet aircraft, which he wrote many authoritative books about.

Léonard began playing rock 'n' roll music at age 16 in various teen bands during the famed "yé-yé" era of the early sixties. After returning from the military service, he embarked on a solo career, and released his first single at age 22, which flopped, but his version of Jefferson Airplane's Somebody To Love later that year enjoyed moderate success. After a couple more singles, Léonard suffered a very serious car accident in 1970, but continued to record singles and albums through the seventies without much success. Finally, during the 1980s, he enjoyed a much wider popularity with a string of hits during the 1980s, selling between 400,000 and 1,400,000 copies of his various singles (some of which being from TV series titles). His musical career never really stopped after that, though the eighties were definitely his peak of popularity. In 2001, he replaced French Canadian singer Daniel Lavoie as part of the cast for the famed musical Notre-Dame-de- Paris for the entire second season, but after that, he mostly took part in nostalgia tours in France and abroad, along with other former glories of French entertainment, although interspersed with heavy health problems in the latter part of the 2010s.



Completely parallel to his music career, Léonard worked as a regular author for Aviation Magazine, starting in 1965 at age 20, and mostly specializing in Soviet World War Two aviation. He wrote several authoritative books on the subject over the years, many of which published by Larivière (publisher of Le Fana de l'aviation) and Heimdal.

His books included:​

• Les avions de chasse Polikarpov (Ouest France)
• Les chasseurs Polikarpov (Larivière)
• Les Chtourmovik (Larivière)
• Les avions de chasse russes et soviétiques 1915-1950 (Heimdal)
• Chasseurs russes et soviétiques 1915-1950 (E-T-A-I)
• Le Toupolev Tu-2 (Heimdal)
• Encyclopaedia of Soviet Fighters 1939-1951 (Histoire et Collections)
• Les chasseurs Lavotchkine (Aero Journal Hors-série)
• Stukas! (Heimdal)
• Ju 87 - De 1936 à 1945 (Histoire et Collections)

Besides these, Léonard also wrote a novel (Pour le désir) and an autobiography (Pour le plaisir... et le reste).

Léonard passed at age 80 on March 2, 2025 after a battle with lung cancer. He leaves a wife, Cléo, and their daughter Éléa, born in 1973.



More on Herbert Léonard: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Léonard

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