Connie Francis

Concetta Rosa Maria Franconero was born in 1938 in Newark, New Jersey to Italian parents and began her career in music as a child accordion player who could sing.

At the age of 11, she won a spot on Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts TV show, on which she appeared for four years.

She gradually became more recognised for her remarkable singing voice than her accordion skills, and despite her father’s insistence that she should one day open a school of music for accordionists, she signed a recording contract with MGM in 1955.

In 1957, she was offered a role in an MGM rock exploitation movie called Jamboree.

Connie played Honey Wynn, a young singer who loved, lost, and loved again in a trashy plot peppered with cameo musical slots from greats like Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Fats Domino.

Connie sang solo and in puppy-love duets with Paul Carr. In this way, MGM turned their young professional singer into their token teen idol.

Connie recorded several unsuccessful singles for MGM until, on her last session – in 1958, with the label threatening to drop her contract – she sang Who’s Sorry Now?

It went straight into the charts (#4 in the US and #1 in the UK) and became the turning point of her career.

In 1959, Connie was the most successful pop singles artist of the year in the United States, with Lipstick On Your Collar hitting the Top 5 in both the US and the UK.

The following year – on 21 June – she topped the US charts for the first time with Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool. It was the first time a solo female singer had hit #1 since Debbie Reynolds’ Tammie three years earlier.

Three months later, Francis was back in the top position with My Heart Has A Mind Of Its Own.

Other notable recordings include her 1963 JFK tribute In The Summer Of His Years, whose profits were donated to relatives of shot policemen, and Where The Boys Are.

The last Connie Francis hit in Britain was Vacation, a catchy song written like a football cheer.

And with that, her four years as a pop star were over. Vacation was the only Connie Francis hit on which she was given a writer’s credit; her co-writers were Gary Weston and Hank Hunter.

She had a troubled life: her aunt was killed in a mugging attack in 1967, and her father, claiming his daughter had become unstable as a result of her grief, had her committed to a psychiatric institution.

A worse ordeal followed in November 1974 when she was raped at knifepoint in her motel room in Westbury, Long Island, for several hours by a masked man.

The police discovered her, naked, gagged and tied to an overturned chair. She later sued the hotel and was awarded $2.5 million in compensation when the courts ruled that the hotel management had been careless in leaving a broken lock and door unfixed. Her assailant was never found.

Francis retreated from public life and sank into a depression. Her mental health struggles were compounded in 1981 when her brother George Franconero, Jr (a lawyer with ties to organised crime figures) was gunned down and killed in a Mafia-related hit.

She was committed to psychiatric facilities several times throughout the 1980s, battling Bipolar disorder and undergoing electroconvulsive therapy.

A botched operation on her nose damaged her vocal cords, requiring years of therapy. In 1984, she attempted suicide and was in a coma for several days.

Her sporadic live performances often made the news due to her erratic behaviour. During a show at the London Palladium in 1989, her speech became slurred, and the press accused her of being drunk on stage (she denied the accusation and claimed she was under the influence of the painkiller Cortisone), while in 1991, she appeared incoherent in an interview on a US chat show.

The following year, she collapsed on stage in New Jersey and was told that her use of lithium (which she’d been taking since the mid-1970s) was killing her.

Connie Francis made a complete recovery in the 1990s and obtained a new recording contract with Sony in 1993 as Lipstick On Your Collar rode the charts once more, thanks to the Dennis Potter TV series of the same name using it as its theme.

She returned to performing live in Las Vegas and Atlantic City, and in 2007, she was inducted into the Hit Parade Hall of Fame.

Connie Francis passed away of pneumonia on 16 July 2025, at the age of 87.