From:The Times (London)

Frankie Vaughan

Frankie Vaughan, CBE, popular singer and entertainer, died in September 1999, aged 71. He was born on February 3, 1928.

Set quintessentially in the mould of the romantic crooner, Frankie Vaughan was one of the most durable of a crop of young British singers who emerged during the early 1950s. Although his career as a maker of hit records was over in little more than ten years from its taking off, he proved remarkably resilient, developing from a teenagers' idol into a mature song-and-dance man with a family appeal. As the years went by, old ladies watching seaside shows learnt to swoon over him just as, earlier, young girls had done at London concert halls.

With his thick, dark wavy hair (which lost none of its attraction when he went grey), a striking, vibrant face and a gleaming smile, Vaughan projected a tough masculinity and attacked his songs with extrovert vigour. He was above all a great performer, with the ability to dominate the stage and project himself to an audience. His best-known number, Give Me the Moonlight, was performed in a top hat and with a silver cane, props which seemed to express his personality, along with the show-stopping high kick which became his trademark.

Indeed, at the height of his career as a teenage heart-throb he was known simply as "Mr Moonlight". These melting qualities may have had their sell-by date in the 1960s for a second wave of pop music fans, weaned on hard rock and its various offshoots; but they never palled with an older generation to whom love and romance were still creatures of fresh air and summer nights, not smoky and strobe-lit disco basements.

Vaughan established himself with a string of hit records, made a film with Marilyn Monroe (whose attentions he famously refused) and continued to keep himself in the public eye through television and cabaret. In 1985 he took over the lead in the West End musical 42nd Street.

He was a tireless worker for charity, particularly boys' clubs, for which he helped to raise more than £2 million. He was also, in the 1960s, involved in the Easterhouse Project, a scheme to help young people in a notoriously gang-dominated area of Glasgow, and from 1964 he served on the Home Office Standing Committee on Juvenile Delinquency. From the outset he was not content merely to be a passive member, continually calling on the Home Secretary of the day for more vigorous action to be taken to combat a problem of which he had first-hand knowledge.

The son of an upholsterer, Frankie Vaughan was born Frank Abelson into a family of Russian Jewish origin in a poor area of Liverpool. (His change of name was to come about, by his own account, when he announced to his Russian grandmother that he intended to be a singer. "Vell," she said, "then you vill be the best von there ever vas.") During the Second World War the family were evacuated to Lancaster, where Vaughan won a scholarship to the Lancaster College of Art. From there he proceeded to Leeds College of Art, where he gained his Art Teacher's Diploma in 1950. After a break for National Service, he trained for a career in commercial art.

His singing talent emerged with Al Jolson impressions during a student rag at Leeds University and while serving in the Army in Malta. After finishing at art college he came to London to seek work as a commercial artist, but the pull of showbusiness was stronger.

Taking up an introduction to the Bernard Delfont agency, he was given a week's engagement at the Kingston Empire. His act was well received and led to another date in Manchester. But a record failed and Vaughan spent a year in the obscurity of touring dance bands. His career finally took off in 1953 with another record, When My Sweetie Went Away, which sold well enough to make him known. It was followed over the next ten years by a succession of hits, including his immensely popular version of the old tune Happy Days, and Lonely Nights; Seventeen; Green Door; Garden of Eden and - another big hit - Heart of a Man.

But he was most closely associated with Give Me the Moonlight, Give Me the Girl, an old song which he discovered in a Glasgow music shop in 1954. He first sang it on stage wearing a top hat hired from an undertaker's, and it became his signature tune.

His performance of it was much mimicked and even provided a running gag for a whole series of the Morecambe and Wise Show, in which the opening bars of the song, followed by glimpses of the hat and cane, prepared the audience for the performer who never appeared.

In his early years Vaughan's appeal was mainly to swooning girls, who mobbed him on his public appearances and provided an avalanche of fan mail. He was dubbed Britain's "hexiest" singer - "hex", in this instance, being a contraction of he-man and sex appeal, and having nothing to do with witchcraft. Vaughan later broadened his act, introducing an element of self-mockery. This enabled him, unlike many of his contemporaries, to retain his popularity by reaching out to older age groups.

Securely established as a recording star, he tried his luck in film. His first part was in the comedy Ramsbottom Rides Again in 1956. He was then taken up by the producer-director Herbert Wilcox and given the lead in These Dangerous Years (1957). The story of a teenage gang leader who mends his ways, it was loosely based on Vaughan's own childhood in Liverpool. He went on to appear opposite Anna Neagle in another Wilcox vehicle, The Lady Is a Square (1958).

In 1960 he was enticed to Hollywood for a supporting part in Marilyn Monroe's penultimate film, Let's Make Love (1960) - turning down the predatory star's invitation to do just that with her in the process. But any chance of a cinema career was effectively ended by a second, totally misconceived, American film, The Right Approach (1961). Appearing as an opportunist attempting to make it as a star, Vaughan found himself locked into a film whose style was embarrassingly naive; from a flop of such magnitude there was simply no way back for him.

Though Vaughan's reign as a top-selling record star was over by the early 1960s, he remained in steady demand for television, cabaret and stage concerts. He was a regular performer on television variety shows, not least The Good Old Days whose bill he topped for the last edition in December 1983. Called up in his late fifties to take over the lead part in 42nd Street at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, he spent almost a year in the show before being forced out first by an ankle injury and then a serious bout of peritonitis.

Nevertheless, once recovered, he continued to be a big crowd-puller at such homely venues as Blackpool's South Pier, into the 1990s. He suffered a ruptured artery in 1992 and underwent major surgery. But, indomitable trouper as he was, he was back in action within months, working out with a fitness instructor to get him back to health, and undertaking further dates at the Brighton Theatre Royal and the Green Room at the Café Royal. But he had a recurrence of his arterial problems earlier this year.

Vaughan was deputy president of the National Association of Boys' Clubs from 1975, and patron, National Boys' Clubs from 1987. He was made a Freeman of the City of London in 1985. In Buckinghamshire, where he settled , he was made a Deputy Lieutenant of the county. His charity work brought him appointment as OBE in 1965 and he was advanced to CBE in 1997.

Frankie Vaughan married in 1951 Stella Shock. It was an exemplary marriage of which there were two sons and a daughter.