Stupid Cupid and Pretty Little Baby singer Connie Francis dies at 87

NEW YORK – American singer Connie Francis, who dominated the pop charts in the late 1950s and early 1960s with sobbing ballads like Who’s Sorry Now (1957) and Don’t Break The Heart That Loves You (1962), died on July 16. She was 87.

She was also known for up-tempo, soft-rock tunes such as Stupid Cupid (1958), Lipstick On Your Collar (1959) and Vacation (1962).

Her publicist Ron Roberts announced her death in a post on Facebook. He did not say where she died or cite a cause. Two weeks ago, she used Facebook to tell fans she had been hospitalised for extreme pain after suffering a pelvic fracture.

Francis had an easy, fluid vocal style, a powerful set of lungs and a natural way with a wide variety of material: old standards, rock ’n’ roll and country, as well as popular songs in Italian, Yiddish, Swedish and a dozen other languages.

Between 1958 and 1964, before her brand of pop music began to fall out of favour, she was the most popular female singer in the United States, selling 40 million records.

Her 35 Top 40 hits during that period included 16 songs that made the Billboard Top 10, including Lipstick On Your Collar (No. 5 in 1959) and Vacation (No. 9 in 1962), and three No. 1 hits: Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool and My Heart Has A Mind Of Its Own in 1960, and Don’t Break The Heart That Loves You in 1962.

She was best known for the pulsing, emotional delivery that coaxed every last teardrop from slow ballads like Who’s Sorry Now – the first of her many records to sell one million copies – and made Where The Boys Are (1961) a potent anthem of teenage longing. Sighing youngsters thrilled to every throb in My Happiness (1958) and Among My Souvenirs (1959).

“What struck me was the purity of the voice, the emotion, the perfect pitch and intonation,” said Neil Sedaka, who wrote her hits Stupid Cupid and Where The Boys Are with Howard Greenfield. “It was clear, concise, beautiful. When she sang ballads, they just soared.”

Her song Pretty Little Baby (1962), which was initially so obscure that Francis had forgotten ever recording it, had an unlikely resurgence in 2025, trending for weeks on TikTok and soaring to top spots on Spotify’s Viral 50 global and US lists.

And American actress Gracie Lawrence, who is playing Francis in Just In Time – a Broadway musical about late singer Bobby Darin, Francis’ one-time romantic partner – posted a video of herself lip-syncing to the song, in her 1960s costume and hair.

Concetta Franconero was born on Dec 12, 1937, in Newark, New Jersey, to George and Ida (Ferrari-di Vito) Franconero. She grew up in the city’s Ironbound neighbourhood. Her father, the son of Italian immigrants, was a dockworker and roofer who loved to play the concertina, and he put an accordion in her hands when she was three.

From that moment, he hovered over her musical development and her career, putting her onstage at local lodges and churches. She made her stage debut at four, singing Anchors Aweigh and accompanying herself on the accordion at Olympic Park in Irvington, New Jersey.

At 11, she was a regular on Marie Moser’s Starlets, a local television variety show. After she appeared on Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour and Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, Mack advised her to lose the accordion, and Godfrey advised her to change her last name to Francis. She then embarked on a four-year run as one of the child entertainers on the anthology series Startime.

As she outgrew the child star category, Francis obtained forged documents and began singing in clubs and lounges. Imitating the vocal styles of stars like Patti Page and Rosemary Clooney, she made demonstration tapes for music publishers who wanted to place their songs with famous singers.

In 1955, she signed a contract with MGM Records, and over the next two years she recorded 10 singles, all of them flops.

“The bombs just kept a-comin’,” she wrote in Who’s Sorry Now?, her 1984 memoir (which, unlike the single and the subsequent album, used a question mark). “They were becoming my trademark, a foregone conclusion.”

Down to her last record and ready to quit show business to attend college, she gave in to her father’s wishes and recorded Who’s Sorry Now, a song she loathed because she thought it sounded old-fashioned. It was first heard on Dick Clark’s television show American Bandstand on Jan 1, 1958, and sold one million copies in the next six months.

“It was the first time I ever recorded that I didn’t try to imitate somebody else,” she said in an interview for classicbands.com in 1994. “I hated the song so much that I didn’t care what I sounded like. So I just sang it.”

For the next four years, Francis reigned as queen of the charts, not only in the US, but also around the world. She sang in foreign languages when required – her first such hit was Mama in 1960, recorded after she learnt Italian – and released albums including Connie Francis Sings Italian Favourites, Connie Francis Sings Jewish Favourites and Connie Francis Sings Irish Favourites.

Like Darin, with whom she was romantically involved until her father chased him off with a gun when she was in her late teens, Francis reached out beyond her teenage audience, recording material that made her a natural in Las Vegas, as well as in nightclubs like the Copacabana in New York. She was also a sought-after entertainer on television variety shows.

With the ascendancy of English rock band The Beatles, Francis’ days on the pop charts were over; her last Top 40 hit was Be Anything (But Be Mine) in 1964. But she retained an enormous following among older audiences, especially overseas, where fans routinely voted her their favourite female vocalist.

In 1974, after performing at the Westbury Music Fair on Long Island, New York, she was raped at knifepoint and then robbed in her nearby motel. She later sued the motel and was awarded US$2.5 million in damages, at the time one of the largest awards made in a rape case.

The experience threw Francis into an emotional tailspin, and she descended into a nightmare of paranoia, suicidal depression and drug abuse. Eventually, after being committed to a mental hospital by her father in the early 1980s, she was found to be suffering from manic depression. (She later said she had been misdiagnosed, and what she had was post-traumatic stress disorder “following a horrendous string of events in my life”.)

She endured other setbacks over the years. In 1967, cosmetic surgery on her nose left her unable to sing in an air-conditioned room, making it impossible to perform in most clubs and Las Vegas casinos. Corrective surgery a decade later caused her to lose her voice. In 1981, her younger brother George was shot to death outside his home.

Not long after her voice failed, her fourth husband, TV producer Bob Parkinson, left her. Three previous marriages, to Dick Kanellis, Izadore Marion and Joseph Garzilli, had ended in divorce.

Information on her survivors was not immediately available. NYTIMES