Connie Francis, who was 87 years old at the time of her death, passed just one week after it was disclosed that she had been sent to the hospital due to “extreme pain.”
The news was verified on Facebook early on Thursday, July 17, by Ron Roberts, a close friend of Francis’s who also happens to be the president of the musician’s record company, Concetta Records.
Roberts made the following statement: “It is with a heavy heart and extreme sadness that I inform you of the passing of my dear friend Connie Francis last night.”
I have no doubt that Connie would be pleased to hear that her followers are among the first to be informed of this unfortunate news. In conclusion, the statement, which was also posted on Francis’ official Facebook site, said that further information will be provided at a later time.
The information comes after Francis said in a post she made on Facebook on the Fourth of July that she was “feeling much better after a good night.” This statement was made two days after it was reported that she had been admitted to the hospital.
In a statement to her followers on July 2, the performer disclosed that she had been “back in hospital” and that she had been “undergoing tests and checks to determine the cause(s) of the extreme pain I have been experiencing.”
A song that Francis had recorded in 1962 called “Pretty Little Baby” became a great success on TikTok 63 years after she had recorded the B-side. This was the reason why Francis had lately been making news.
Francis was one of the most successful singers of the 1950s and early 1960s. He was a contemporary of Elvis Presley and Brenda Lee, and he had a number of songs that reached the top ten, including “Who’s Sorry Now?,” “My Heart Has a Mind of Its Own,” “Where the Boys Are,” and “Don’t Break the Heart That Loves You.” When Francis released her song “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool” in 1960, she became the first woman to record a song that reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
During the year 1937, the singer was born in Newark, New Jersey, with the name Concetta Franconero. Because of her father’s encouragement, she started competing in talent shows and pageants when she was only four years old. She sang and played the accordion during these competitions. She eventually started making appearances on television programs, and she was a featured performer on the NBC program Startime Kids. She decided to perform under the stage name Connie Francis.
In 1955, she secured a recording deal with MGM Records; nevertheless, the majority of her early singles were not successful. The label was going to drop her, but her father convinced her to record a version of “Who’s Sorry Now?” as a last attempt at a hit in 1957.
In 1996, Francis said to the United Press International that he had 18 bomb records. It was his desire for me to record a song that was composed in 1923. I said ‘Forget about it — the kids on American Bandstand would laugh me right off the show.’ He said, ‘If you don’t record this song, dummy, the only way you’ll get on American Bandstand is to sit on the TV.”
Until it was first played on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand in 1958, the song was likewise not very successful in terms of its performance. Following its success in the United States and the United Kingdom, Francis and Clark would go on to develop a relationship that would last a lifetime.
A number of subsequent singles, including “My Happiness,” “Lipstick on Your Collar,” and “Among My Souvenirs,” contributed to the expansion of Francis’s career beyond that point. Her album “Connie Francis Sings Italian Favorites” was released in 1959 and went on to become her most successful album. In 1960, her song “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool” became her first number one single in the United States. It was also the first time that a solo female artist had ever topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart, which had been established in 1958.
The fact that Francis re-recorded her songs in a variety of languages contributed, at least in part, to her fame on the worldwide stage. “My Heart Has A Mind Of Its Own” (which reached the top place barely three months after “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool”) and “Don’t Break The Heart That Loves You” were, respectively, her two other songs that reached the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
During the early stages of her career, she was quoted as saying to PEOPLE in 1992, “I was sitting on top of the world and didn’t know what problems were yet.” In addition, Francis had appearances in a few films throughout the 1960s, one of which being the success of the adolescent romantic comedy Where the Boys Are, which was released in 1960 and also featured a young George Hamilton.
As the music business underwent significant transformations in the late 1960s, Francis saw a decline in his level of achievement, which was followed by a string of personal catastrophes. On Long Island, she was a victim of a rape that occurred in a hotel room in the year 1974. 1977 was the year that she had nose surgery, which resulted in her momentarily losing her voice. And the year 1981 saw the murder of her brother George at the hands of the mafia.
During the same year, she attempted to make a return in her profession, but it was hampered by the difficulties she was experiencing with her mental health. The fact that she survived an attempt at suicide in 1984 is a testament to the fact that her father put her to various mental facilities. In the same year, she released her first autobiography, which was titled Who’s Sorry Now?
In 2011, she gave an interview to the Village Voice in which she said, “To make a long story short, during the 1980s, I was involuntarily committed to mental institutions seventeen times over the course of nine years in five different states.” I was given a diagnosis that was incorrect, which included bipolar disorder, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and a few additional letters that the scientific world had never heard of before. After a series of terrible occurrences in my life, it was not until a few years later that I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
In addition to being an advocate for rape victims, she was a member of a task group on violent crime that was established in collaboration with the government of Ronald Reagan. 2010 marked the beginning of her collaboration with Mental Health America, which aimed to increase awareness of the impacts of trauma as well as remedies for it.
“Even when I was in a mental institution, I tried to find humor in everything,” she said in an interview with The Oklahoman in 2018. “However, I must highlight the fact that the support of the general population has also been quite encouraging. They were there for me through the best and the worst of times, and they never stopped writing to send me words of encouragement from all over the globe. Within the year 2017, Francis published yet another memoir titled Among My Souvenirs.
During the early stages of her career, Francis fell in love with the singer Bobby Darin; nevertheless, her father managed to keep them apart. Even though he had passed away in 1973 at the age of 37, she thought of Darin as the love of her life. “My personal life is a regret from A to Z,” Francis said in 1984’s interview with People magazine. “I realized I had allowed my father to exert too much influence over me.”
The woman had four different marriages. It was Dick Kanellis who was her first husband; they tied the knot in 1964 and divorced after just five months of marriage. In 1971, she tied the knot with Izzy Marion, but they divorced ten months later. In 1973, she tied the knot with Joseph Garzilli. Joseph Garzilli Jr. was the boy whom they adopted in the year 1974. In 1977, the partnership came to an end. In 1985, she tied the knot with Bob Parkinson for the fourth time, but for the same reason, the marriage only lasted for a few months this time around.
In 2017, Francis expressed her desire to be remembered “not so much for the heights I have reached, but for the depths from which I have come. I hope I did okay.” She said this in an interview with PEOPLE.