After a year at the Sorbonne, she answered a newspaper advertisement looking for young singers. Hardy signed her first contract with the record label Vogue in November 1961. In April 1962, shortly after she left university, her first record, “Oh Oh Chéri”, appeared, written by Johnny Hallyday’s writing duo. Her own flip side of the record, “Tous les garçons et les filles”, became a success, riding the wave of yé-yé music in France. It sold over a million copies and was awarded a gold record. The track peaked at No. 36 in the UK Singles Chart in 1964. She reportedly hated the song, saying that it was recorded “in three hours with the worst four musicians in Paris”. She was dating photographer Jean-Marie Périer at this time, and his shots are featured on many of her record sleeves.

Hardy sings in French, English, Italian, German and has two interpretations in Spanish and one in Portuguese. Her recordings in Italian, completed in Paris in 1963 under the production of Ezio Leoni, remain to this day highly acclaimed. In 1963, she represented Monaco in the Eurovision Song Contest, finishing fifth with “L’amour s’en va”. In 1963, she was awarded the Grand Prix du Disque from the Académie Charles Cros (see Grand Prix du Disque for French Song).

Françoise Hardy made her film debut in 1963, after having been chosen by director Roger Vadim to take the role of Ophélie in his movie Nutty, Naughty Chateau (Château en Suède, drawn from Françoise Sagan’s piece for theatre of that name). She then did three to four performances as singer in some musicarelli in Italy, for example, Questo pazzo, pazzo mondo della canzone in 1965. This same year, Hardy played a minor role as the Mayor’s assistant in Clive Donner’s film What’s New Pussycat? and then had a supporting role in A Bullet Through the Heart (Une balle au cœur), directed by Jean-Daniel Pollet. In 1966, she made a cameo appearance in a scene from Jean-Luc Godard’s film Masculin, féminin, then participated in Grand Prix, a US blockbuster focusing on Formula 1 racing and the lives of the drivers, directed by John Frankenheimer, in which she plays Lisa, the girlfriend of Nino Barlini, a fictional Italian driver. Following this role, Françoise Hardy did not want to make films anymore, but in 1972 she had a cameo role as a hippie in the film Les Colombes (The Doves) by the Québécois filmmaker Jean-Claude Lord. This was her final appearance on the screen apart from in Claude Lelouch’s 1976 film If I Had to Do It All Over Again (Si c’était à refaire), where she appears as a singer performing a song.

Hardy is mentioned in a poem “Some other kinds of songs” by Bob Dylan, which appears on the back cover of his album Another Side of Bob Dylan, released in 1964.

In 1981, she married her long-time partner Jacques Dutronc, who is the father of her son Thomas Dutronc, born in 1973. Hardy lives in the 16th arrondissement of Paris and Dutronc in Monticello, Corsica, but they reportedly remain legally married.

In 1994, she collaborated with the British pop group Blur for their “La Comedie” version of “To the End”. In 1995, she sang on Malcolm McLaren’s single “Revenge of the Flowers”. The song appears on his concept album Paris. In May 2000, she made a comeback with the album Clair-obscur, on which her son played guitar and her husband sang the duet “Puisque vous partez en voyage”. Iggy Pop and Étienne Daho also took part. She has also recorded a duet with Perry Blake, who wrote two songs for Tant de belles choses. For this album, Hardy won the trophy Female Artist of the Year at the Victoires de la musique ceremony in 2005.

In a scene from director John G. Avildsen’s film Save the Tiger (1973), Jack Lemmon’s character Harry Stoner makes a reference to Hardy during a melancholy telephone call to his wife. Her song “Tous les garçons et les filles” played during the British film Metroland (1997) and Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers (2003). The French movie 8 Femmes (2002) features her song “Message Personnel” as sung by the French actress Isabelle Huppert. Her recording of “Träume” plays during the end credits of François Ozon’s Water Drops on Burning Rocks (Gouttes d’eau sur pierres brûlantes) (2000). Her song “L’Amitié” is played during the end credits of Denys Arcand’s movie The Barbarian Invasions (Les Invasions barbares), which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2003 (the main character had referenced her in an earlier scene in the movie with images dating from 1965).

Because of her difficult upbringing, Hardy became painfully shy – a trait which is still part of her character today. When asked about her shyness in an interview with John Andrew, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2011, she said:

In 2012, Hardy marked her 50-year career by releasing her 27th album, L’Amour fou; she also wrote and published a book of the same title.

On 5 March 2015, after two years of silence, a second book was published under the title Avis non-autorisé… (“Unauthorized opinion”). In this book, she reflects on old age, her interests and her annoyances.

After a serious illness in March 2015, she stated that she had no desire at all to write songs. She regained her health after two years and began returning to the recording studio in November 2017.