Lulu is returning to the West End stage after an absence of more than 30 years to star in 42nd Street as the veteran diva Dorothy Brock.
The Scottish singer has been a star since she was 15, with a career in pop music, film and theatre stretching back to the 1960s, and the unforgettable opening bellow of Shout!, her first hit record.
She won the Eurovision song contest in Madrid in 1969 with Boom Bang-a-Bang.
Her first major acting role came in 1967, when she starred with Sidney Poitier in To Sir, With Love, and she had a No 1 hit in the US with the title song.
In the 1980s, she appeared in a string of big musicals in London, including Song and Dance in 1982 and Guys and Dolls in 1984. She was last seen in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which closed after just 68 performances at the Savoy in 1987.
She will take over from Sheena Easton from 19 March in the role of Brock, an ageing, jealous and vengeful star of the musical stage. The backstage musical has been a hit at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane since it opened in April last year.
Lulu, 69 – born Marie McDonald McLaughlin Lawrie in Stirlingshire in 1948 and brought up in Glasgow – was making professional singing appearances from the age of 12.
She recently completed an international concert tour, promoting an album of her own songs, Making Life Rhyme. She was awarded an OBE for services to music in 2000.
Career highlights include her hit version of David Bowie’s The Man Who Sold the World, produced by Bowie himself, and her No 1 hit in 1983 for Relight My Fire, in collaboration with Take That.
She was chosen for the Bond theme song The Man with the Golden Gun, in 1974, but later said she and Madonna, who recorded Die Another Day in 2002, had the worst Bond songs: “Except I think mine was probably the worst one ever. Mine was not a great song.”
