Diminutive international star Petula Clark was born in Ewing, Surrey, daughter of a Welsh mother and English father. They went to live outside London during the blitz, and it was there, at age nine, that she made her radio debut inadvertently: she was at a BBC event when there was an air raid; the organizers asked if someone could sing to calm the studio audience, and it was enthusiastic when she did so. She sang for the BBC for the remainder of the war, giving 500 performances, including 200 to entertain the troops. Meanwhile in 1944, a filmmaker had seen her at a show at Royal Albert Hall and promoted her as a child actress for several movies and television series. In 1947, when 15, she met Glasgow pianist Joe Henderson (known as “Mr. Piano”); they collaborated for the next decade. For her stage name “Petula,” she used a combination of the names of her father’s former girl friends, Pet and Ulla. In 1949 she recorded her first song, Teresa Brewer’s “Music, Music, Music.” In 1954 she hit the charts with “The Little Shoemaker” and later hit No. 1 twice in Britain with “Sailor” and “This is My Song.”
A new career singing in French began in 1957 when she fell in love with Parisian Claude Wolff, an executive with Vogue Records whom she married in 1961. Although she was now touring Europe, recording hits in French, Spanish, Italian and German, her career in Britain began to falter. Tony Hatch, one of her collaborators, proposed some new songs; she turned them down, but heard him fiddling with chords on an unfinished melody that she loved. This became “Downtown,” an immediate hit in Britain and No. 1 in the United States in 1965, selling 3 million copies. She reached the U.S. top 40 some 15 times in the next three years, winning three Grammy awards, two for “Downtown" and another for “I Know a Place.” She also made several films, among them, “Finian’s Rainbow In 1981 she turned to the stage and acted in shows in London and on Broadway, once playing the role of Maria von Trapp in “The Sound of Music” so well that von Trapp pronounced her the best Maria she had seen. Before the pandemic shut it down in 2020, she was playing the “Bird Woman” in Mary Poppins. Her honors include Commander of the Order of the British Empire (1998), Commander of the “Ordre des arts et des lettres” in France, the “Grand prix national du disque français, and the induction of “Downtown” into the Grammy Hall of Fame. She sold more than 70 million records in five languages during her eight-decade career.