Paul Anka

He was appointed an officer of the Order of Canada in 2005. She is worth an estimated £15 million (2003) and she owns luxury homes in Buckinghamshire, West London, Marbella and Barbados. In 1991, the Government of France honored him with the title "Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters". One of them, Robert, succeeded his father as her manager. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6840 Hollywood Blvd. They had 3 sons. Paul Anka was elected to the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 1980. She was married to her manager Bobby Willis for over 30 years until his death in the late 1990s.

Born to parents of Lebanese origin, in 1999 he returned to Lebanon for sell-out performances at the Forum de Beyrouth (The Beirut Forum). In 2003 she released a music career retrospective New Beginnings. He returned to his home town to buy a part of the Ottawa Senators hockey team. In 1993 she was awarded an OBE. On September 6, 1990, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. She remains an extremely popular personality in the UK. By the 1970s, Anka's career centered around adult contemporary and big-band standards, played regularly in Las Vegas. She hosted the popular television programme Blind Date (1985 - 2003), Surprise, Surprise (1984 - 1999) and Moment of Truth (1998 - 2001).

After more than ten years without a hit record, in 1974 he teamed up with Odia Coates to record the number 1 hit, "Having My Baby." They would record two more duets that both made it into the Top 10. Black continued recording and became a popular TV personality in the 1970s, hosting her own long-running variety series, and her TV work began to eclipse her musical fame. From his movie work, he wrote and recorded his monster hit, "Lonely Boy." He then went on to become one of the first pop singers to perform at the Las Vegas casinos. Her last Top Ten hit was "Something Tells Me" in 1971. In the 1960s, Anka would begin acting in motion pictures as well as writing songs for them, most notably the theme for the hit movie The Longest Day. After Epstein's death and a disastrous appearance in the flop film Work Is a Four-Letter Word, Black's pop career began to decline. His talent went beyond singing, writing Buddy Holly's giant hit, "It Doesn't Matter Anymore," the theme for Johnny Carson's Tonight Show, Tom Jones' biggest hit record, "She's A Lady", and "My Way," Frank Sinatra's signature song. She branched into acting with 1964's Ferry Cross the Mersey, which also featured another member of Epstein's management stable, Gerry & The Pacemakers. Epstein remained her manager after dropping most of his other acts, but she decided to leave him in 1966 for Robert Stigwood; before she could, however, Epstein died of a drug overdose.

He toured Britain and then, with Buddy Holly, toured Australia. Frequently using songs composed by close friend Paul McCartney -- including her 1968 hit Step Inside Love -- Cilla's chart success continued until the end of the Sixties. He followed up with four songs that made it into the Top 20 in 1958, making him one of the biggest teen idols of the time. The other song most often associated with her is the Bacharach-David song Alfie, the theme from the Michael Caine film of the same name. Produced by the notoriously perfectionistic Burt Bacharach and recorded at Abbey Road Studios, Cilla cited the Alfie recording session as one of the most demanding of her pop career. "Diana" is one of the best selling 45s in music history. It is one of the best-remembered songs of her career and also gave Cilla her first major chart success in the United States, Australia, New Zealand and Europe. The song, "Diana," brought Anka instant stardom as it rocketed to number one on the charts. Her next single and her second #1 hit, You're My World, was an English version of the Italian popular song Il Mio Mondo.

Anka began singing as a child and, encouraged by his parents, at age 14 he recorded his first single, "I Confess." In 1957 he went to New York city where he auditioned for ABC, singing a lovestruck verse he had written to a former babysitter, Diana Ayoub. It launched her on an extraordinarily successful pop career and she went on to score twenty consecutive Top 40 hits on the British single and EP charts, including eleven British Top Ten singles and two consecutive #1 singles in 1964. Paul Anka OC (born July 30, 1941, in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada) is a Canadian-born American singer and songwriter. It had already been a hit for Dionne Warwick but Cilla's 1964 version shot to #1 in Britain and became the biggest selling single by a female artist in the history of British popular music. Her second single was the Burt Bacharach-Hal David composition "Anyone Who Had a Heart". The single peaked at a modest #35, making it a failure, relatively speaking, compared to most of Epstein's other artists.

Epstein signed Cilla to Parlophone records and introduced her to George Martin, who produced her debut single, "Love of the Loved" (written for her by Lennon and McCartney), which was released only three weeks after she signed with Epstein. But after seeing her again at the Blue Angel jazz club, Epstein signed Cilla up as his only female client on September 6, 1963. The first audition was not successful, partly because of nerves, and partly because the Beatles (who backed her) played the songs in their vocal key rather than re-pitching them for Cilla's voice. Cilla was introduced to Epstein by John Lennon who persuaded him to audition her.

Although her first name was often shortened to "Cilla", her stage name came about by accident when local music paper Mersey Beat misprinted her name as Cilla Black, but she liked the sound and decided to use it professionally. She became close friends with the Beatles and after their breakthrough to international success in 1963, their manager Brian Epstein took over the management of a number of other musicians from Liverpool. During this period she also worked as waitress at the Zodiac coffee lounge, where she met her future husband and manager Bobby Willis. Ideally placed to promote herself to local musicians, she impressed The Beatles and others with her talent and began her stage career with impromptu performances at the Cavern.

In the early 1960s, determined to break into show business, she got a job as a part-time as a cloakroom attendant at the famous Cavern Club in Liverpool, where the Beatles regularly played. A naturally gifted singer, as a child Cilla was encouraged to sing by her family. Cilla Black (born Priscilla Maria Veronica White on May 27, 1943) is a British singer and entertainer, and was the second-biggest star to emerge from the Liverpool scene after the Beatles.