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Los Angeles (AP) – Connie Francis, the healthy pop star of the fifties and 60s whose successes include “Pretty Little Baby” and “Who am I feel now?” – The last one that would later serve as an ironic title for a personal life full of anguish and tragedy – has died at age 87.

His death was announced Thursday by his friend and publicist, Ron Roberts, who did not immediately provide additional details.

Francis had a high performance of the era before Beatles, rarely outside the 1957-64 lists. Able to attract young people and adults, they had more than a dozen 20 best successes, starting with “Who sorry now?” and including songs No. 1 “Don’t Break The Heart That Love You” and “The Heart has its own mind”. Like other teenage favorites of his time, he also starred in several films, including “Where the Boys Are” and “The Boys follows.”

The dark hair singer was only 17 when she signed a contract with MGM Records after appearances in several television variety programs. His first recordings attracted little attention, but then launched his version of “Who’s Sentot Now?” An old Ballad of Ted Snyder, Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby.

He also succeeded until Dick Clark touched him in his “American Bandstand” program in 1958. Clark presented her repeatedly in “American Bandstand”, and said in later years that without his support, he would have abandoned his musical career.

Via News

Via News

Francis continued with teenage successes such as “stupid cupid”, “Everybody’s Holybody’s Fool” and “Lipstick on Your Collar”. His albums became hits worldwide while recording versions of his original songs in Italian and Spanish, among other languages. His concerts throughout the country were rapidly exhausted.

Meanwhile, a romance flourished with his fellow teenage idol Bobby Darin, who had volunteered to write songs for her. But when his father heard rumors that the couple was planning a wedding, he broke into an essay and took a gun to Darin, finishing his relationship and seemed to put Francis on a painful and traumatic path.

She told part of that in her autobiography: “Who sorry now?”

“My personal life is a repentance from A Z,” he told News in 1984, the year the book came out. “I realized that I had allowed my father to exert too much influence on me.”

His father, George Franconero, was a New Jersey roof contractor who played the accordion. He was only 3 years old when his father presented an accordion the size of a child, as soon as he began to show an aptitude for music. When he was 4 years old, he began to reserve singing dates for her, becoming her manager.

Although his career as an actor had vanished in the mid -1960s, Francis was still popular in the concert circuit when he appeared in the Westbury Music Center in Westbury, New York, in 1974. He had returned to his hotel room and was asleep when a man entered and raped her in Knifepoint. He was never captured.

Francis sued the hotel, claiming that his security was defective, and a jury granted him $ 2.5 million in 1976. The two parties resolved out of court for $ 1,475,000 when an appeal was pending. She said the attack destroyed her marriage and led her to spend years of emotional agitation.

She suffered a tragedy in 1981 when her brother George was shot dead when he left her New Jersey house. Later, that decade, her father committed her to a psychiatric hospital, where she was diagnosed as maniac depressive. At one point he tried to commit suicide swallowing dozens of sleeping tablets. After three days in a coma, he recovered.

She was married four times and would say that only her third husband, Joseph Garzilli, was worth it. The other marriages lasted less than a year.

Concetta Rosemarie Franconero was born on December 12, 1937 in Newark, New Jersey. At 9 years he began to appear on television programs, including “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts” and “The Perry as show”. It was Godfrey who suggested to shorten his last name.

Francis experienced a resurgence this year, when “Pretty Little Baby” became a popular song on Tiktok, something that left her “stamped and excited” and inspired her to join Tiktok.

“To think that a song that I recorded 63 years ago is captivating the new generations and the public is really overwhelming for me,” he said in his own publication in early June.

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The national writer Hillel Italie contributed reports from New York. Bob Thomas, a Hollywood reporter for a long time for News, was the main writer of this obituary and died in 2014.