Cilla Black was born on this date in 1943. 10 things you might not know about her:
Her real name was Priscilla Maria Veronica White. She became known as Cilla Black after an article in the first edition of the local music newspaper Mersey Beat mistakenly referred to her as Cilla Black. She decided she liked the name and decided to keep it.
She left school at 14 having being told her best career match was office work. She did a typing course and qualified as a Dictaphone typist, but that wasn’t what she wanted to do with her life.
She did work as a typist but had two other jobs. During her lunch hour, she was a hat girl at the Cavern Club, and in the evening served coffee at The Zodiac coffee lounge. At the Cavern Club, she met The Beatles, who were impressed by her impromptu performances, and at the Zodiac, she met her future husband and manager, Bobby Willis.
The Beatles persuaded Brian Epstein to audition her, but it didn’t go well. Cilla was nervous, and the Beatles, acting as her backing group, neglected to re-pitch the songs to suit her voice. However, she was spotted singing at the Blue Angel Club and the rest is history.
Cilla Black was the first British female artist to have two consecutive number-one hits. Her first number 1 was Anyone Who Had A Heart, in 1964, quickly followed by You’re My World.
She turned down the chance to represent Britain in the 1968 Eurovision song contest on the grounds that Sandie Shaw had won the year before and Cilla didn’t think another UK female singer had any chance of winning.
A brief foray into film acting wasn’t a huge success. She appeared in the "beat" film Ferry 'Cross the Mersey (1965) and the psychedelic comedy Work Is a Four-Letter Word (1968). In 1969 she almost got the role of Michael Caine's girlfriend in The Italian Job, but negotiations fell through.
Cilla was also known for television work, in particular Surprise Surprise and Blind Date. On the latter, she once outed live on air an undercover journalist who’d become a contestant to get an inside scoop on the show. Nicola Gill got a severe lecture from Cilla, who said, "You don't work as a temporary secretary. I know for a fact that you're actually an undercover journalist and you've robbed somebody of coming on a proper blind date."
One of her biggest regrets was that she never cracked the US music scene, although Elvis Presley had a copy of You're My World on his Graceland jukebox.
In 2017, a statue of Black commissioned by her sons was unveiled outside the Cavern Club's original entrance for the venue’s 60th anniversary. The sculpture shows a young Cilla performing one of her early songs.
New!!!
The six richest people in Britain decide to hold a contest to settle the question of which of them is most successful. It will be a gladiator style contest with each entrant fielding a team of ten super-powered combatants. Entrepreneur Llew Powell sets out to put together his team, which includes his former lover, an employee of his company with a fascinating hobby, two refugees from another dimension (a lonely giant and a drunken sailor), two sisters bound together by a promise, a diminutive doctor, a former Tibetan monk initiate and two androids with a history. As the team train together, alliances form, friendships and more develop, while others find the past is not easy to leave behind.
Meanwhile, a ruthless race of aliens has its eyes on the Earth. Already abducting and enslaving humans, they work towards the final invasion which would destroy life on Earth as we know it. Powell’s group, Combat Team Alpha, stumble upon one of the wormholes the aliens use to travel to Earth and witness for themselves the horrors in store if the aliens aren’t stopped. Barely escaping with their lives, they realise there are more important things to worry about than a fighting competition.
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