Joseph Ira Dassin (5 November 1938 – 20 August 1980) was an American–French singer-songwriter and actor. He was the son of film director Jules Dassin. 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. His father was of Ukrainian-Jewish and Polish-Jewish extract ...