It makes sense that the French torch singer Édith Piaf (1915–63) should be the subject of the much buzzed-about new film, “La Vie en Rose,” which opens Friday. After all, Piaf’s remarkable career has always benefited from sentimental mythologizing, notably in “Piaf,” the 1978 British stage play by Pam Gems, starring Jane Lapotaire in the title role, later filmed for TV. There was also the 1983 film “Édith and Marcel” by the noted director Claude Lelouch, which immortalized Piaf’s tragic romance with a prizefighter, Marcel Cerdan.

For decades, Piaf’s tiny, hunched figure onstage radiated the drama of an abused waif, an emaciated child of the streets battling for survival by wailing her woes in a full-throated, metallic voice. Even her stage name, “la Môme Piaf” or “Kid Sparrow” — she was born Édith Gassion — suggested a bantamweight boxer as much as a singer. Her plangent songs, such as 1946’s “La vie en rose” (“A Rosy Life”), 1950’s “Hymne à l’amour” (“Hymn to Love”), and 1960’s “Non, je ne regrette rien” (“No, I Regret Nothing”) clawed for affirmation in a world of dismal suffering. French EMI has just issued a worthy tribute, a 20-CD set of Piaf’s complete recordings for its label.

Born into dire poverty in the Paris neighborhood of Belleville, Piaf was abandoned by her performing parents at an early age and grew up among prostitutes and thugs, eventually giving birth to a daughter while still in her teens (the baby died soon after of meningitis). Although Piaf was “discovered” at 20, her adult life was equally triste, paralleling the drug- and alcohol-induced doom that Americans of the era saw in the life and career of Judy Garland.

Piaf went through a series of husbands and lovers, as well as bouts of morphine addiction and great public grief. Like Elizabeth Taylor, who lost her husband Mike Todd in a much-publicized 1958 plane crash, Piaf lost her lover, the boxer Cerdan, in a front-page air disaster in 1949. Unlike Liz, Piaf did her mourning onstage with “Hymn to Love,” which did not leave a dry eye in the house. In this song, which she co-wrote, Piaf declares with strident certainty that in heaven, “God reunites those who are in love.”

Likewise, in the 1960s, when the prematurely aged and exhausted Piaf found a new lover, a strapping young Greek actor-singer named Théo Sarapo, she staged their love with a desperate song in dialogue: “À quoi ça sert l’amour?” (“What Use Is Love?”). In the duo, Piaf harshly bellows at Sarapo, “You are my last, you are my first, before meeting you I was nothing,” with violent exhibitionism.

Some in Piaf’s long line of lovers are still active on the French scene today, such as the singer-songwriters Charles Aznavour and Georges Moustaki. Other performers around the world have been drawn to the passionate drama within many of Piaf’s songs; some have even recorded them in phonetic French, not fully grasping the meaning of the lyrics. On his best selling album “Closer,” the young American star Josh Groban sings “Hymn to Love” in studied French, including the line addressed to a lover: “I would dye my hair and become a blond woman if you asked.”

Surely Mr. Groban did not mean this literally, any more than his assertion later in the song that “I would betray my country if you asked” should require the intervention of the Department of Homeland Security. The stalwart Irish Tenor Ronan Tynan gets into similar hot water on his 2002 album “My Life Belongs to You,” when he sings — in the original French — “La Vie en Rose,” a song clearly intended to be sung by a woman: “When he takes me in his arms and speaks softly to me, I see life in a rosy way.”

But then, Piaf’s impact transcends mere details of language, as her unparalleled fame indicates. Her tiny stature —well under 5 feet tall — led Time magazine to dub her the “thimble-sized French songbird.” Usually dressed in black, with frizzy unkempt hair, Piaf hid her musicians behind a curtain so that the spotlight and the audience’s attention would focus on her alone. Her series of protégés — who included the actor-singer Yves Montand — were usually dropped if they became too popular with audiences and threatened her own supremacy. This kind of vehemence helped ensure her continuing stardom, eclipsing some superb French torch singers before and after her. Some of these can be sampled on reissues from the French label Chansophone, or on Pavilion Records’s compilations, “Paris! Oh! Que j’aime Paris” and “Paris Rive Gauche.”

The protégés include Fréhel (1891–1951), a mighty actresssinger whose “Where Have My Lovers Gone?” is womanly and humane in a way Piaf, who was frozen in the persona of a squalling abused child, could never attain. Fréhel endured her own tragedies, falling into alcoholism and drug addiction out of frustrated love for — of all people — Maurice Chevalier. Another monumental singer, Berthe Sylva (1885–1941), tore out hearts with teary ballads like “White Roses,” about a poor boy who steals flowers to give to his dying mother.

At a legendary 1930s concert in Marseilles, Sylva’s public was driven into Dionysian fervor, ripping the wooden seats off their hinges in grief. Fréhel and Sylva still sound more appealing than Piaf on recordings, Yet both were stout, sturdy women. The ever-vulnerable, fragile wraith of Piaf looks likely to continue to enjoy primacy in audience sympathy and commiseration, a French singer who can be adored even by audiences who don’t understand French.