TV star touched by sadness

Four years after losing her husband to cancer, Cilla Black is coping with an attack on her son by masked raiders as they robbed her Buckinghamshire mansion.

Black said the attack on her youngest son, Jack, 22, was worse than the theft of her jewellery, but the haul - estimated by the star to be worth £1m - contained many items of sentimental value.

Among them were most of Black's gifts from late husband Bobby Willis.

His death from lung and liver cancer robbed the former Blind Date presenter of the man who had acted as her agent and adviser during 30 years of marriage in the showbiz spotlight.

Black spent 18 of those as the host of Blind Date, before announcing her decision to leave the ITV show live on air in January after changes to modernise the format.

Her career in entertainment has spanned more than 40 years, crossing genres as she went.

Brought up in a Liverpool that was recovering from the war, Priscilla White, as she was born, knew she wanted to be more than a office worker from a young age.

Football struggle

And she certainly broke out of her working class roots, becoming one of television's biggest stars.

Black found a place as one of the UK's highest paid presenters as the face of Saturday night ITV, with an OBE to boot.

On her word, ITV moved its flagship football show, The Premiership, to a later slot to make way for the return of Blind Date.

It was a far cry from when "our Cilla" was a teenager hanging up coats at Liverpool's Cavern Club in the 1960s. Her mother ran a market stall in the city.

With a determination, and the obligatory gift of the gab, Cilla White never missed an opportunity to get up on stage.

Typing error

She was not a natural singer, but she was good enough for the Beatles' manager, Brian Epstein, who welcomed her into his stable as his only female vocalist.

It was he who changed her name to Black, it is said, to appeal to Jewish impresarios, although other stories suggest it was a typing error in a local newspaper which led to the change.

With the help of an endearing personality, George Martin's musical production and Epstein's canny management, Cilla Black was soon riding high in the charts with cover versions of songs such as Anyone who had a Heart and You've Lost that Loving Feeling.

In 1964, an initial seven-week booking for Black at the London Palladium lasted for seven months.

Two years later, she recorded what the initially doubtful Martin termed "the definitive version of Alfie", and the following year had another hit with Paul McCartney's Step Inside Love.

Epstein's final deal for his songbird, before his death in 1967, was for her own BBC variety show, titled Cilla.

Inseparable couple

Her management needs were assumed by Willis, whom she married in 1969.

The couple remained inseparable until his death in 1999.

Willis wrote seven of her B-sides and became what Black called her "talisman and security blanket".

He attended to every aspect of her career leaving his wife to check only "that her eyelashes were the right way up".

Bobby Willis guided Cilla from variety show hostess to star of Saturday evening light entertainment.

In the 1970s, the couple splashed out on the 17-acre mansion in the Buckinghamshire village of Denham, where the robbery took place.