New film about singing nun who stormed US charts

Worldwide star: Jeannine Deckers, seated, overtook the Beatles to top the American pop charts
Danny Brierley12 April 2012

A film about the singing nun who overtook the Beatles to top the American pop charts is released tomorrow.

The story of bespectacled Jeannine Deckers tells the tale of a young singer from Brussels who eventually took her own life.

Her rise from a convent intern to the Grammy award-winning superstar who became known as "Elvis Presley in a habit" has already inspired several stage and screen adaptations.

The film called Soeur Sourire - Deckers' stage name meaning "Sister Smile" - documents her leaving home in 1959 to join a Dominican convent near Waterloo in Belgium. Four years later senior sisters allowed her to record a fundraising single for its mission in Congo.

The song, Dominique - inspired by the 13th century saint who founded her order - sold millions when it was released in 1963.

She left the religious order and attempted to continue her career, at one stage writing an ode to contraception called Glory Be To God For The Golden Pill.

In 1985, addicted to alcohol and tranquillisers, she killed herself alongside her partner, Anne Pecher. She is the only Belgian to have had a number one in the US.

Cécile de France, the Belgian actress who plays Deckers in the film, described her as a rebel and a "punk before her time", but also that her "aggression and arrogance" was toned down in the film to make the character more accessible.

In 1966 a film called The Singing Nun starring Debbie Reynolds was made about Deckers, who rejected it and branded it "fiction".

After the one-hit wonder Deckers struggled with her international fame. There was a kitsch disco version of Dominique in 1982 but her career stalled and Belgian tax authorities pursued her - she donated all the proceeds of her hit to the convent but could not provide documents to prove it.

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