Joe Dassin

Joseph Ira Dassin (; November 5, 1938 – August 20, 1980) was an American–French singer-songwriter and actor. He was the son of film director Jules Dassin. Early life Dassin was born in New York City to American film director Jules Dassin (1911–2008) and Béatrice Launer (1913–1994), a New York-born violinist, who after graduating from a Hebrew High School in the Bronx studied with the British violinist Harold Berkely at the Juilliard School of Music. Both of his parents were mostly of Ukrainian-Jewish extraction from Kamianets-Podilskyi, Sataniv and Buchach. Dassin lived in New York City and Los Angeles until his father fell victim to the Hollywood blacklist in 1950, at which time his family moved to Europe. Between the ages of ten and fifteen Dassin changed schools eleven times. He studied at, among other places, the International School of Geneva and the Institut Le Rosey in Switzerland, and finished his secondary education in Grenoble. Dassin moved back to the United States, where he attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan from 1957 to 1963, winning an undergraduate Hopwood Award for fiction in 1958 and earning a Bachelor of Arts in 1961 and a Master of Arts in 1963, both in Anthropology. Career