Concetta Rosa Maria Franconero ( FRAHNG-koh-NAIR-oh; December 12, 1937 – July 16, 2025), known professionally as Connie Francis, was an American singer and actress. One of the top-charting female vocalists of the late 1950s and early 1960s, she amassed over 200 million records sold, placing her among the best-selling music artists in history.
After a string of unsuccessful releases, Francis rose to fame in 1957 with her cover of the 1923 song "Who's Sorry Now?", which was followed by various other top-10 hits. She became the first woman to reach No. 1 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart when "Everybody's Somebody's Fool" topped the chart in 1960. She was also the first woman to achieve three No. 1 hits on the chart, among her 53 career entries. Before the advent of the British Invasion, Francis was the most popular female vocalist in the United States between 1958 and 1964.
Francis recorded music in multiple languages, including English, Spanish, Italian, French, German, Greek, Yiddish, and Japanese, making her a best-selling artist in international markets as well as in American immigrant communities. She recorded songs from various genres, including traditional pop standards, brill building pop, rock and roll, country and jazz.
Between 1974 and 1988, a series of traumatic personal experiences, including a rape attack at knifepoint, led Francis to suffer years of psychological and physical difficulties that sidelined her career. She resumed performing from 1989 until her retirement in 2018. She regained prominence in 2025, shortly before her death, when her 1961 recording "Pretty Little Baby" went viral on social media platforms.
1937–1955: Early life and first appearances
Francis was born on December 12, 1937, to an Italian-American family (one of her grandfathers having emigrated from Reggio Calabria in 1905) in the Ironbound neighborhood of Newark, New Jersey, the first child of George Franconero (1911–1996) and Ida (née Ferrari-di Vito; 1911–2000). She spent her first years in the Crown Heights, Brooklyn area (Utica Avenue/St Mark's Place), before the family moved to New Jersey. Growing up in a mixed Italian-Jewish neighborhood, Francis became fluent in Yiddish, which led her later to record songs in Yiddish and Hebrew. Francis had a younger brother, George Franconero Jr. (1940–1981).
In her autobiography Who's Sorry Now? published in 1984, Francis recalls that her father encouraged her to appear regularly at talent contests, pageants, and other neighborhood festivities as a child singing and playing the accordion.
During rehearsals for her appearance on Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts in December 1950, Francis was advised by Godfrey to change her stage name to Connie Francis for easier pronunciation. Godfrey also told her to drop the accordion—advice she gladly followed, as she had begun to hate the large and heavy instrument. Around the same time, Francis took a job as a singer on demonstration records, to bring unreleased songs to the attention of established singers and/or their management who might choose to record them for a professional commercial record.
Francis attended Newark Arts High School in 1951 and 1952 before she and her family moved to Belleville, New Jersey. Francis graduated as salutatorian from Belleville High School in 1955.
Francis continued to perform at neighborhood festivities and talent shows (some of them broadcast on television), appearing alternately as Concetta Franconero and Connie Franconero. Under the latter name, she appeared on NBC's variety show Startime Kids between 1953 and 1955.
1955–1957: Recording contract and commercial failure
In 1955, Startime Kids went off the air. In May that year, George Franconero Sr. and Francis's manager George Scheck raised money for a recording session of four songs which they hoped to sell to a major record company under Francis's own name. Even when MGM Records decided to sign a contract with her, it was because one track she had recorded, "Freddy", happened to be the name of the son of a company executive, Harry A. Meyerson, who thought of the song as a nice birthday gift. Hence, "Freddy" was released as Francis's first single, which turned out to be a commercial failure, just like her next eight solo singles.
Despite these failures, Francis was hired to record the vocals for Tuesday Weld's "singing" scenes in the 1956 movie Rock, Rock, Rock!, and for Freda Holloway in the 1957 Warner Bros. rock and roll movie Jamboree.
In the fall of 1957, Francis enjoyed her first modest success with a duet single she had recorded with Marvin Rainwater: "The Majesty of Love", with "You, My Darlin' You" as the B-side, peaked at number 93 on the Billboard Hot 100. Eventually, the single sold over one million copies.
However, her minor chart success came too late for her record label—Francis's recording contract consisted of ten solo singles and one duet single. Though success had finally seemed to come with "The Majesty of Love", Francis was informed by MGM Records that her contract would not be renewed after her last solo single.
Francis considered a career in medicine and was about to accept a four-year scholarship at New York University. At a recording session for MGM on October 2, 1957, with Joe Lipman and his orchestra, she recorded a cover version of the 1923 song "Who's Sorry Now?", written by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby. Francis said that she recorded it at the insistence of her father, who was convinced it stood a chance of becoming a hit because it was a song adults already knew and that teenagers would dance to if it had a contemporary arrangement. Francis did not like the song and argued about it with her father heatedly, delaying the recording of the other two songs during the session so much that she thought no time was left on the continuously running recording tape. Her father insisted though, and when the recording "Who's Sorry Now?" was finished, only a few seconds remained on the tape.
The single seemed to go unnoticed, like all previous releases, just as Francis had predicted, but on January 1, 1958, it debuted on Dick Clark's American Bandstand. Francis watched the show and later said:
I heard Dick Clark mention something about a new girl singer. So, what else is new? Another girl singer. There are ninety-five million females in the country, and I'll bet ninety-five percent of them sing. "There is no doubt about it", predicted Mr. Clark. "She's headed straight for the number one spot". I began feeling sorry for myself and a bit envious, too. Good luck to her, I thought. And then Mr. Clark just happened to play a song called "Who's Sorry Now?" My "Who's Sorry Now?" Well, the feeling was cosmic, just cosmic!