Kathy Kirby (born 20 October 1940), was a popular English singer of the 1960s.

Kathy Kirby was born Kathleen O'Rourke on the 20th October 1940 in Ilford, Essex. Her singing career started soon after leaving school when, following a meeting with the bandleader Bert Ambrose at the Ilford Palais, she managed to secure a job singing with his orchestra. It was no mean feat for a girl of such tender years as the Ambrose orchestra, with hundreds of recordings under its belt, once laid claim to being Britain's best hotel band of the thirties and had enjoyed audiences that regularly included royalty.
She remained with Ambrose's band for three years and he remained her manager and mentor until his death in 1971.

Kathy achieved national prominence in the U.K. as a resident singer, on the British TV series, "Stars and Garters" (1963). She adopted the look of a 'blonde bombshell', and was compared to Marilyn Monroe. Her looks, lip-gloss and her powerful, pitch-perfect voice became her trademarks. Signed to Decca records, she had several hit singles, scoring her first Top 20 smash hit with Dance On, a chart topper by the British Group, The Shadows from earlier that year. Kathy's version also topped the single charts in Australia. An attempt to create similar waves by adding lyrics to another instrumental, this time the version by The Spotniks of the traditional "Hava Nagila" was less of a success, despite being given a similar Kirby treatment. Probably, she is most remembered for her dramatic re-working of the Doris Day song, 'Secret Love' which reached the UK Top 5. That year (1963), she won Top British Female Singer in the New Musical Express poll.

Further hit singles were provided in the form of a cover version of Teresa Brewer's "Let me go lover," as well as "You're the One," and 1965's British Eurovision Song Contest entry, "I Belong," which came a creditable second. For her performance, author and historian John Kennedy O'Connor describes "I Belong" as being far more representative of current musical tastes than other songs from the contest, but Kathy was beaten by the even more contemporary song from Luxembourg, written by Serge Gainsbourg and performed by France Gall. She also sang the theme tune of the BBC television series Adam Adamant Lives!. In 1965 she also scored a hit single in the U.S. with the song "The Way of Love."

Kirby's star faded in the late 1960s. She recorded twelve singles and an album between 1967 and 1973, but did they did not achieve her previous success. She continued to make television appearances, and her 1974 appearance on The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club TV variety show is available to watch on YouTube.

During the 1970s Kirby endured bankruptcy and some health problems, but she made occasional television appearances and performed a few live gigs on the "nostalgia circuit". In December 1983, although only still in her early forties, she retired from show business altogether. In recent years, she has lived quietly at her home in Kensington, West London. Her absence from the recording scene is a major source of regret, for Kathy possessed one of the finest female singing voices on the British side of the Atlantic.

Her music is now attracting some renewed interest after the publication of a biography in 2005 entitled Secrets, Loves and Lip Gloss by James Harman, and the launch of an official website. There have been unconfirmed reports of plans to dramatise her life story based on the biography, and for some live performances.

(info various but mainly Wikipedia)