OT Sunday: Anthony Newley sings Goldfinger

In some ways, I like this version better than Shirley Bassey's.



Anthony George Newley (24 September 1931 – 14 April 1999) was an English actor, singer and songwriter. He enjoyed success as a performer in such diverse fields as rock & roll and stage and screen acting.

Early life
Newley was born in the London working class district of Hackney, the son of Frances Grace Newley and George Kirby, a shipping clerk. He was Jewish on his mother's side. His parents, who had never married, separated during his early childhood, and he was brought up by his single mother. Newley was evacuated during the Luftwaffe bombing of London during the Blitz and was thereby exposed to the performing arts when he was tutored during this time by George Pescud, a former British music hall entertainer.

Although recognised as very bright by his teachers back in London, he was uninterested in school, and by the age of fourteen was working as an office boy for an insurance company when he read an ad in the Daily Telegraph, headed "Boy Actors Urgently Wanted". He applied to the advertisers, the prestigious Italia Conti Stage School, only to discover that the fees were too high. Nevertheless, after a brief audition, he was offered a job as an office boy on a salary of only 30 shillings (£1.50) a week, but also including free tuition at the school. He naturally accepted and his career was to be launched. Whilst serving tea one afternoon he caught the eye of producer Geoffrey de Barkus, who cast Newley as "Dusty" in the children's serial, The Adventures of Dusty Bates.

Career
Newley's first major film role was as Dick Bultitude in Peter Ustinov's Vice Versa (1948) followed by the Artful Dodger in David Lean's Oliver Twist (1948), based on the classic Charles Dickens story. He made a successful transition from child star to contract player in British films of the 1950s (broken up by a short stint in the armed forces), to a top-of-the-pops crooner in the 1960s. During the 1950s he appeared in many British radio programmes and for a time appeared as Cyril in Floggits starring Elsie and Doris Waters. But it was probably the film Idol on Parade that changed his career direction the most. In the film he played a rock singer called up for national service.

He wrote ballads, many with Leslie Bricusse, that became signature hits for Sammy Davis Jr., Shirley Bassey and Tony Bennett. During the 1960s he also added his greatest accomplishments on the London West End theatre and Broadway theatre stage, in Hollywood films and British and American television. In the 1970s he remained active, particularly as a Las Vegas and Catskills Borscht Belt resort performer and talk show guest, but his career had begun to flounder. He had taken risks that eventually led to his downfall in Hollywood. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s he worked to achieve a comeback. He died of kidney cancer at the age of 67, soon after he had become a grandfather.

Music
Newley had a successful pop music career as a vocalist, which started in May 1959 with the song "I've Waited So Long" a number 3 hit in the UK charts thanks largely to the exposure it received as being featured in the film "Idol On Parade". This was quickly followed by his number 6 hit "Personality" and then two number-one hits in early 1960: "Why" (originally a 1959 U.S. hit for Frankie Avalon) and "Do You Mind?" (written by Lionel Bart). As a songwriter, he won the 1963 Grammy Award for Song of the Year for "What Kind of Fool Am I?", but he was also well-known for "Gonna Build a Mountain", "Once in a Lifetime", "On a Wonderful Day Like Today", "The Joker" and comic novelty songs such as "That Noise" and "The Oompa-Loompa Song", and his versions of "Strawberry Fair" and "Pop Goes the Weasel".

He wrote songs that others made hits including "Goldfinger" (the title song of the James Bond film, Goldfinger, music by John Barry), and "Feeling Good", which became a hit for Nina Simone and the rock band Muse. With Leslie Bricusse, he wrote the musical Stop the World - I Want to Get Off in which he also performed, earning a nomination for a Tony Award for Best Leading Actor in a Musical. The play was made into a (poorly-received) film version in 1966, but Newley was unable to star in it due to a schedule conflict. The other musicals for which he co-wrote music and lyrics with Bricusse included The Roar of the Greasepaint—the Smell of the Crowd (1965) and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971), based on the children's book by Roald Dahl.

The consensus of critics and fans rates "Pure Imagination", "Ain't It Funny", "Love Is a Now and Then Thing", and "In My Solitude" at the top of the list. Amongst the many compilations now available are Anthony Newley: The Decca Years (1959–1964), Once in a Lifetime: The Anthony Newley Collection (1960–1971), and Anthony Newley's Greatest Hits (Deram).

When he collaborated with Bricusse, they referred to themselves as the team of 'Brickman and Newburg', with Newburg concentrating mainly on the music and Brickman on the lyrics. Ian Frasier often did their arrangements and it has been suggested that his contributions were more extensive than has been acknowledged. For the songs from Hieronymous Merkin, Newley collaborated with Herbert Kretzmer.

The comedy album Fool Brittania, starring Newley, Joan Collins and Peter SellersIn 1963, Newley had a hit comedy album called Fool Britannia!, the result of improvisational satires of the British Profumo scandal of the time by a team of Newley, his then-wife Joan Collins, and Peter Sellers. Newley's contributions to Christmas music are highlighted by his rendition of "The Coventry Carol" which appears on many anthologies. He also wrote and recorded a novelty Christmas song called "Santa Claus is Elvis". And there is a notorious album of spoken poetry which has Newley appearing in the nude on the sleeve with a similarly-attired young model.

In his later years as a mature singer Newley recorded songs from Fiddler on the Roof and Scrooge. He enjoyed his final popular success onstage when he starred in the latter musical which showed in London and toured UK cities including Liverpool, Birmingham and Manchester, in the 1990s. At the time of his death he had been working on a musical of Shakespeare's Richard III.

In May 2010 Stage Door Records released a compilation of unreleased Newley recordings entitled 'Newley Discovered'. The album produced with the Anthony Newley Society and Newley's family contains the concept recordings for Newley's self-penned movie musicals 'Can Hieronymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?', 'Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory' and 'Mr. Quilp'.

In recognition of his creative skills and body of work, Newley was elected to the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1989.

Acting
The short-lived 1960 ATV series, The Strange World of Gurney Slade, in which Newley starred and also featured Bernie Winters, continues to have a cult following owing to its postmodern premise that the Newley character is trapped inside a television programme. Apart from a repeat of one episode on Channel 4 in 1992, it has not been seen in the UK in recent years. The show's theme tune by composer Max Harris, which was later utilised in the "animated clock" segments on the BBC children's show Vision On, may be better known today than the series itself. The piano figure prominent in the recording was lifted (unacknowledged) from Mose Allison's song "Parchman Farm".

Newley played Matthew Mugg in the original Doctor Dolittle and the repressed English businessman opposite Sandy Dennis in the original Sweet November. He also hosted Lucille Ball on a whirlwind tour of mod London in the Lucy TV special "Lucy in London." He performed in the autobiographical, Fellini-esque and X-rated Can Hieronymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?, which he also directed and co-wrote with Herman Raucher. He performed in 'Quilp' (based on Dickens's 'The Old Curiosity Shop'), for which he composed some songs ('Love Has the Longest Memory of All'). His last feature role in the cast of the long-running British TV soap opera EastEnders was to have been a regular role, but Newley had to withdraw after a few months when his health began to fail.

Personal life
Newley was married to Ann Lynn from 1956 to 1963, but the marriage ended in divorce. A son, Simon, was born to them but died in infancy from a congenital infirmity. He then was married to the actress Joan Collins from 1963 to 1971. The couple had two children, Tara Newley and Sacha Newley. Tara became a broadcaster in England and Sacha is a renowned portrait artist based in New York and represented by four paintings in the National Portrait Gallery (United States) in Washington, D.C.. Newley's third wife was former air hostess Dareth Rich, and they also had two children, Shelby and Christopher. In an episode of Angela and Friends (Sky One) Tara Newley also mentioned another sister, a third living daughter of Newley's.

Newley had been raised by his mother Grace, and, from the age of eight onward, by his stepfather, Ronald Gardner. Gardner wound up in Beverly Hills working as a chauffeur but soon ran off with another woman. Newley searched, with the help of a detective, for his biological father, George Kirby, and effected a reunion. Newley bought his father a house in Beverly Hills, in the hope that he would reunite with Grace, but this did not happen.

Newley died on 14 April 1999, in Jensen Beach, Florida, from renal cancer at the age of 67. He was said to have died in the arms of his companion, the designer Gina Fratini.[10] He was survived by his five children, a granddaughter Miel, and his mother Grace, then aged 96, who has subsequently died. Since then two more grandchildren have been born: Weston (Tara's second child) and Ava Grace (Sacha's first, with his wife Angela Tassoni).

Newley's life is the subject of a biography by Garth Bardsley called Stop the World (London: Oberon, 2003). Although Newley alluded to some degree of bisexual activity in 1960s in his epic autobiographical film, Merkin, the allegation in the Bardsley biography that he had been "kept" by an older man while he struggled to restart his career in the 1950s was a shock to his fans. In 2007 the actress Anneke Wills published a memoir that details her involvement with Newley just before he took up with Collins, producing a daughter named Polly who perished in a car accident.