";s:4:"text";s:4781:" Unseen Cilla Black footage shows Simon Cowell helping her to grieve after husband Bobby's death.
I was never going to be like that.”Meanwhile, she’d already met Bobby, a handsome young baker with Woolworth’s.Pursuing his girl, he offered to be her manager, and would drive her from club to club in his work van.
He saw me as the new Judy Garland. Everyone knew it was Cilla, dreaming of motherhood, who had trotted off with prams left outside for an instant.”She later became the first woman in her family to take an office job. “We weren’t exactly what you’d call rock ’n’ roll, were we?”By the time the lovebirds married on January 25, 1969, Cilla was a household name.
“Secretly I don’t want to linger,” she told the Mirror last year.The very suggestion that Cilla would ever linger, fading quietly into obscurity, is now unthinkable.Her’s was a fame that seemed irrespressible from that first time we saw her - the feisty teenager whose Priscilla Maria Veronica White – whose stage name was coined when music magazine Mersey Beat called her Cilla “Black” by accident - grew up on Scotland Road, Liverpool, with docker dad John, market trader mum Priscilla, and three brothers.She once recalled the neighbourhood was so tough boyfriends would not walk her home to their flat over a barber’s shop.She described how her mother, ‘wept for want of a front door of her own’ , and once laughed of herself as a kid: “I used to pinch babies.
It would be very, very hard to match the wonderful marriage Bobby and I had.”Even when OBE Cilla was honoured with a special BAFTA award in 2014 for her services to television – she was still presenting up until 2009 - she accepted with a heavy heart.Although it was 15 years since Bobby had died, she admitted the honour was ‘bitter sweet’ because he could not share it.Heartbreak: Cilla Black never got over the death of husband Bobby Willis from cancer in 1997Happy family: Cilla Black with her husband, Bobby, and their three sonsYooung love: Cilla Black and her husband and personal manager Bobby WillisAlways close: Cilla Black and her husband Bobby WillisCilla Black: She never stopped mourning her beloved husband, BobbyClose pals: John Lennon and Ringo Starr (back row centre) stand with Rolling Stone Brian Jones (far left), folk singer Donovan (second left), Cilla Black (second right) and Paul McCartney (right)Celeb pals: Cilla Black with Dale Winton and Barbara Windsor
Read more: Cilla Black 'time machine' track released five years after her death It will provide some comfort to those mourning Cilla that she and Bobby will, somewhere, be holding hands againAs a young pop princess too nervous to sing he would hold her hand, and famously remained by her side for the rest of their married life.And today, if there is one comfort to those mourning the death of A 60s’ singing sensation and a TV entertainment legend she may have been, but most recently it was the flame-haired scouser’s love story with fellow Liverpudlian Robert Willis, which had cemented her place in our hearts.Captured to critical acclaim by Sheridan Smith in an ITV drama last year, we saw It re-established for a new generation her true talent as a singer with a powerhouse voice - showing she was much more than just the larger-than-life TV host from Blind Date and Surprise Surprise in the 1980s and 1990s.But most poignantly, we saw in heartwarming detail the debt she owed to her devoted husband Bobby, and understood the crushing blow she suffered when, after 30 years of marriage, he died in 1999 from lung cancer aged 57.It was a blow she struggled until the end to overcome, and despite her iconic and always ‘fabulous’ smile, never truly did.
Yet when Epstein offered him a contract, Cilla told him he couldn’t do that and support her.“I made him say no.