Adamo, Salvatore, 1943-

Born in Sicily, the international singer and composer, Salvatore Adamo, was the son of a well-digger; the family moved to Belgium when he was three years old. As a child, one of seven children, he was stricken with meningitis and confined to bed for several years. From this inauspicious beginning, he became the best-selling Belgian musician of all time, singing mostly in French but also in Italian, Dutch, English, German, Spanish, Japanese and Turkish. His career was launched when he won the top prize in Paris of a 1960 Radio-Luxembourg competition. He was soon famous, but his father drowned in 1966 and was thus not able to witness the subsequent peak of his son’s celebrity. His albums and singles have sold over 100 million copies. For a while in the 1980s, his emotional vocal style went out of fashion but in the 1990s his career revived due to a wave of nostalgia. In 1993, he was appointed Belgium’s honorary UNICEF ambassador, a post that involved worldwide travel. In 1998, he made an album commenting upon racism and Bosnia’s civil war. In 2001, he was knighted by King Albert II of Belgium, with the noble title of “Ridder.” The following year he was named Officer of the Belgian Order of the Crown.