Petula Clark

• 1. Introduction

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  Petula Clark was performing for troops during the Blitz when she was still a child, her photo plastered on British Army tanks as a good-luck mascot. Born Sally Clark on the 15th of November 1932 in Ewell, Surrey, she would go on to sell an estimated 100 million records across more than eight decades of continuous performance. She sang in French, German, Italian, and Spanish. She defied a television sponsor during one of the most racially charged weeks in American history. She played the same stage role more than 2,500 times. How does a girl who first performed in a Welsh mining village become what America eventually called the First Lady of the British Invasion? And why, long after the charts stopped calling, did she keep returning to the stage?

• 2. A Welsh Beginning

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  Clark's grandfather was a coal miner, and she first performed in front of a live audience in 1939 at the Colliers' Arms in Abercanaid, near Merthyr Tydfil in Wales. Her stage name, Petula, was not her birth name at all. Her father, Leslie Noah Clark, invented it as a joke, claiming it was a blend of the names of two former girlfriends, Pet and Ulla. Both her parents worked as nurses at Long Grove Hospital in Epsom, giving the family a practical, working-class grounding that sat oddly alongside their daughter's gifts.

  As London came under German bombardment, Clark recalled watching dogfights in the sky and running to shelters with her sister. When she was eight, she joined a BBC recording session designed to send messages from children to family members serving in the forces. The recording took place at the Criterion Theatre, an underground venue chosen for its safety. When an air-raid siren sounded mid-session, the other children grew distressed. Someone in the control room called for a volunteer to sing and settle the room. Clark stepped forward, sang "Mighty Like a Rose", and impressed the producers enough that they kept the recording.

  Her first ambition, though, was not singing but acting. Her father took her to see Flora Robson in a production of Mary Stuart in 1944, and she later recalled: "I made up my mind then and there I was going to be an actress.... I wanted to be Ingrid Bergman more than anything else in the world." Her first professional fee arrived before that ambition could take shape. In 1945 she performed with an orchestra in the entrance hall of Bentall's Department Store in Kingston upon Thames and was paid with a tin of toffee and a gold wristwatch.

• 3. Radio, Film, and Early Records

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  Clark's formal professional career began in October 1942 when her father brought the nine-year-old to a BBC broadcast so she could send a message to an uncle stationed overseas. An air raid delayed the broadcast, a producer asked for a volunteer, and she ended up launching what would become a run of some 500 appearances in programmes made to entertain the troops. She was nicknamed the "Singing Sweetheart" and performed for George VI, Winston Churchill, and Bernard Montgomery. Troops from the British Army plastered her photos on their tanks as they advanced into battle, and she became known as "Britain's Shirley Temple".

  While performing at the Royal Albert Hall in London in 1944, she was spotted by film director Maurice Elvey, who cast the twelve-year-old as the orphaned waif Irma in his war drama Medal for the General. A rapid succession of films followed, including I Know Where I'm Going!, the Huggett Family series, Vice Versa directed by Peter Ustinov with Anthony Newley, and The Card alongside Alec Guinness. She toured the United Kingdom as a child performer alongside Julie Andrews.

  By the time she was in her mid-teens she had grown impatient with child roles. She began her television career in 1946 on a BBC variety show called Cabaret Cartoons and was soon signed to host her own afternoon series, Petula Clark, followed by Pet's Parlour in 1950. On the recording side, she met Joe Henderson in 1947 at the Peter Maurice Publishing Company. Henderson introduced her in 1949 to record producer Alan A. Freeman, who helped found Polygon Records along with her father. She recorded "Put Your Shoes On, Lucy" for EMI that year, and then began scoring UK hits including "The Little Shoemaker" in 1954, which reached number one in Australia. "Suddenly There's a Valley" and "With All My Heart" followed in 1955 and 1956. When Polygon was sold near the end of 1955 to Nixa Records, a subsidiary of Pye Records, Clark's contract effectively transferred to the Pye label, where she would record into the early 1970s.

• 4. Paris and the Continent

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  In 1957, Clark travelled to Paris to appear at the Olympia despite nursing a bad cold and carrying considerable doubt about the reception she would get. The audience gave her an enthusiastic welcome. The following morning she was summoned to the office of Vogue Records to discuss recording in French. Waiting for her there was a young publicist named Claude Wolff, born on the 6th of January 1931. Clark was drawn to him immediately, and when she learned he would work alongside her if she signed with the label, she signed. They married in June 1961 and had two daughters and a son.

  Clark's 1961 recording of "Sailor" reached number one in the UK, her first chart-topper at home. "Romeo" followed into the British Top 10, sold more than one million copies worldwide, and brought her a gold disc from the Recording Industry Association of America. In France, "Ya Ya Twist" - the only successful recording of a twist song by a woman, according to the source - and "Chariot", which was the original version of "I Will Follow Him", both became major hits in 1962. Clark also recorded songs by Serge Gainsbourg, and Jacques Brel gave her the song "Un Enfant" as a gift. A live recording of it charted in Canada. Clark is one of only a handful of performers to have received a song directly from Brel.

  Her work expanded beyond performing when she composed the score for the 1964 French crime film A Couteaux Tirés in 1963, making a cameo as herself in the process. Additional film scores followed across the next two decades. In February 1964 she became the subject of This Is Your Life, a distinction she would repeat in April 1975 and again in March 1996. She remains the only person to have received the television tribute three times.

• 5. Downtown and the American Arrival

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  By 1964, Clark's British chart career was in trouble. Tony Hatch, the composer and arranger who had been working with her in both Paris and London, flew to her home in Paris carrying new song material. She found none of it appealing. Running short of ideas, he played her a few chords of an incomplete piece inspired by his recent first trip to New York City. She told him that if his lyrics were as strong as the melody, she wanted to record it as her next single. That song was "Downtown".

  Released in four separate languages in late 1964, "Downtown" reached number one in the American charts in January 1965. Three million copies were sold in the United States. It was also a hit in the UK, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Australia, Italy, Rhodesia, Japan, and India. Warner Bros. executive Joe Smith had heard it during a London visit and acquired the US rights. "Downtown" won Clark the Grammy Award for Best Rock and Roll Recording of 1964, and in 2004 it was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.

  Between January 1965 and April 1968, Clark placed nine singles in the US top 20. These included "I Know a Place", which won her the Grammy for Best Contemporary Vocal Performance - Female of 1965, and two US number-one hits: "My Love" and "Downtown" itself. Alongside those, "This Is My Song", drawn from Charles Chaplin's film A Countess from Hong Kong, reached number one in the UK. The American recording industry called her the First Lady of the British Invasion. In 1968, she received the MIDEM international award for the highest worldwide record sales by a female artist, following a 1967 MIDEM award for most sales in Europe by a European artist.

  Clark's American television presence grew alongside her chart run. She appeared on programmes hosted by Ed Sullivan and Dean Martin, guested on Hullabaloo and Shindig, and in 1968 NBC invited her to host her own special. While recording the show, she and guest Harry Belafonte sang a duet of her antiwar composition "On the Path of Glory". When she took hold of his arm during the performance, a representative from the show's sponsor, the Chrysler Corporation, demanded they substitute a different take - one where the two performers stood apart. Clark and her husband Wolff, who was executive producing the special, refused, destroyed the alternative takes, and delivered the programme to NBC with the moment intact. The Chrysler representative lost his job. The programme aired on the 8th of April 1968, four days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., to high ratings and a Primetime Emmy nomination.

• 6. Alongside the Famous

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  Clark appeared in the 1968 film Finian's Rainbow opposite Fred Astaire and received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Motion Picture Musical or Comedy for the performance. The following year she starred with Peter O'Toole in Goodbye, Mr. Chips, a musical adaptation of James Hilton's novella.

  Through the late 1960s she performed at venues including the Copacabana in New York City, the Ambassador Hotel's Cocoanut Grove in Los Angeles, and the Empire Room at the Waldorf-Astoria. It was during this period that Richard Carpenter credited Clark with bringing his sister Karen and him to the attention of Herb Alpert when they performed at a premiere party for Goodbye, Mr. Chips in 1969. She had already introduced the French composer Michel Colombier to Alpert in 1968; Colombier went on to co-write the score for Purple Rain with Prince.

  In June 1969, Clark was performing in Montreal when she found herself being heckled for singing in two languages. She went to John Lennon for advice. He and Yoko Ono were at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal for their bed-in protest. Clark ended up participating in the recording of "Give Peace a Chance". Four months later, on the 15th of November 1969, her concert An Evening with Petula from the Royal Albert Hall became the first BBC One colour transmission.

  Clark also recalled visiting Elvis Presley's dressing room in Las Vegas with Karen Carpenter. She quoted Presley as saying: "Wow, the two biggest girl pop stars in my dressing room. That's pretty good." Her friendship with Karen Carpenter ended when Carpenter died in early February 1983. On the 6th of February 1983, during a concert at the Albert Hall, Clark performed "For All We Know" as a tribute to her, two days after Carpenter's death.

• 7. Stage Life and Later Decades

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  Clark returned to the legitimate stage in 1981, playing Maria von Trapp in The Sound of Music at the Apollo Victoria Theatre in the West End. The opening attracted what was then the largest advance ticket sale in British theatre history. Maria von Trapp herself named Clark "the best Maria ever." Clark extended her initial six-month run to thirteen months. She received a Laurence Olivier Award nomination for Best Actress in a Musical.

  Stage work continued to draw her in. She made her Broadway debut in 1993 at the Music Box Theatre in Blood Brothers, a production she and David Cassidy are credited with rescuing from failure. Andrew Lloyd Webber's Sunset Boulevard followed, with Clark appearing in both the West End and American touring productions from 1995 to 2000. She reprised the role of Norma Desmond in Cork, Ireland in 2004 in a production later broadcast by the BBC. With more than 2,500 performances in that role, she has played Norma Desmond more often than any other actress.

  In 1988, a disco remix of "Downtown" titled "Downtown '88" returned her to the UK singles chart for the first time since 1972, reaching the Top 10. A 1992 single called "Oxygen", produced by Andy Richards and written by Nik Kershaw, extended her recording activity into that decade. Then and Now, a compilation released in June 2008, entered the UK Albums Chart and earned her first silver disc for an album. In 2013 her album Lost in You entered the UK national album chart at number 24 on the 3rd of March, and included a cover of Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy" that ran on the Belgium chart for fourteen weeks.

  In 1998 she was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II. In 2012, the French Minister of Culture installed her as a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Her autobiography, Is That You, Petula?, was published in 2025, and in November 2017 she embarked on her first US tour in five decades, releasing the English-language album Living for Today to accompany it.