Happy 85th Birthday, Petula Clark

Thanks for honoring one of ours. She was a local heroine in our area. My elder brother went to school with her brother.

The second of these two statements from IMDb does surprise me.

The first British female pop singer in the rock era to have a number one hit single in the United States.

The best-selling British female vocalist in history.

I like this story from IMDb. (If true).

In 1968 Clark and singer Harry Belafonte were singing a duet on her show when she touched Belafonte's arm. A representative for the show's sponsor, Chrysler Corp., saw it and ordered the director to have them re-tape the duet and not to have Clark touch his arm, the rationale being that viewers in the South would be outraged to see a white woman touching a black man, and the South was a big market for Chrysler's cars. Clark redid the scene, but when she found out the reason why, she and her husband - the show's producer - stormed into the control booth, ordered the director to destroy the second take and keep the original one. As expected, when the show was aired a few weeks later, many stations in the South wouldn't show it, and Chrysler received many letters from outraged Southerners saying they would never buy a Chrysler product again because of the company's sponsorship of the show.

I don't think she ever made a big splash as an actress. I mainly remember her in the Huggetts series, not much of a testimony. One film she was in that I did like was Dance Hall (1950), a portmanteau film (they were all the rage at that time), but she was not one of the leads.

I think I first learned about this while listening the commentary track from the Criterion label of this movie.