"Maybe I'll marry a nice Dominican priest, and we'll have Dominican babies. It's not as unlikely as it seems."
Jeanne-Paul Marie Deckers was born October 17, 1933, in Belgium, the daughter of Gabrielle and Lucien Deckers. She went to art school, and was briefly engaged, before, in 1959, joining the Fichermont Dominican Convent in Waterloo, Belgium, and taking the name of Soeur Luc-Gabrielle. As Soeur Sourire (Sister Smile, which she did not like to be called), she had an international hit with "Dominique", which she wrote in 1963 to praise St. Dominic, the founder of her order. This hit was number 1 on the charts while Louie Louie was number 2, and she won a Grammy. Even now, she began getting grief from her Mother Superior.
A movie about her, The Singing Nun, in 1966, starred Debbie Reynolds. Soeur Luc-Gabrielle was not very fond of it.
In 1967, she changed her religious name to Soeur Luc-Dominique, recorded an album called I Am Not A Star, and, unhappy with the changes brought to the Catholic Church after Vatican II, left her order in order to pursue a recording career. She recorded a song called "The Golden Pill", in praise of the birth control pill. She agreed with John Lennon that the Beatles were bigger than Jesus. In 1970 she began to write songs critical of the Church. Later, she and Annie Pecher, who may or may not have been her lover, founded a school for autistic children. Her life began spiraling downward, and her use of pills increased.
During her brief stardom in the early sixties, she donated all of her earnings to the convent. But in the early 1980s, the Belgian government began going after her for $63,000 in back taxes on those earnings. That, coupled with the financial trouble she had gotten into with the school, led to her and Annie Pecher's double suicide on March 30, 1985, in Wavre, Belgium, by barbiturates and alcohol.