[3] "One of Broadway's greatest leading men", from 1959 to 1962 he scored a dozen entries on the UK Singles Chart, including two number one hits.

His songs have been sung by a wide variety of singers including Fiona Apple, Tony Bennett, Barbra Streisand, Michael Bublé and Mariah Carey.

With songwriting partner Leslie Bricusse, Newley was nominated for an Academy Award for the film score of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971), featuring "Pure Imagination", which has been recorded by dozens of singers.

An "icon of the early 1960s", his TV series The Strange World of Gurney Slade "continues to have a cult following due to its advanced postmodern premise that [he] is trapped inside a television programme.

"[5][7] Described by The Guinness Book of British Hit Singles & Albums as "among the most innovative UK acts of the early rock years before moving into musicals and cabaret",[8] Newley was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1989.

As "the son of a single mother, who waited on him hand and foot – even after he was married", Newley "mourned the absence of his real father, until, at 82, a jobbing builder made himself known.

[16] Although recognised as very bright by his teachers, by the age of fourteen he had left education and was working as an office boy for an advertising agency in Fleet Street called Hannaford and Goodman.

Prompted by an advertisement in The Daily Telegraph entitled "Boy Actors Urgently Wanted", he applied to the Italia Conti Stage School, only to discover that the fees were too high.

[9] During the 1950s, Newley made twenty-seven movies for J. Arthur Rank, many of them in the United States, "comfortably transitioning from child to adult actor".

During the decade, Newley appeared in many British radio programmes, including as Cyril in Floggits, which starred Elsie and Doris Waters, and also "became increasingly involved with the theatre.

[18][14] The film also launched his career as a pop singer, with the song "I've Waited So Long" – which featured in the soundtrack – reaching number 3 in the UK charts.

the result of improvisational satires of the British Profumo scandal of the time by a team of Newley, his then wife Joan Collins, and Peter Sellers.

[22][23][citation needed] Throughout the 1960s, Newley enjoyed sustained success on London's West End theatre, on Broadway, in Hollywood films, and on British and American television.

A hit in London and on Broadway,[14] it was made into a film version in 1966,[citation needed] in which Newley was unable to star owing to a schedule conflict.

The film is "a surrealist sex-drenched disaster that could only ever have been made in the more free-wheeling Sixties", and starred his then-wife, Joan Collins, who said that his self-serving behaviour prompted her to get a divorce.

In the summer of 1983, Newley was the lead in Chaplin, a Broadway-bound musical he co-wrote with Stanley Ralph Ross, that never made it out of previews in Los Angeles.

[3] He briefly appeared on Late Night with David Letterman (when in town to be inducted into the Songwriters' Hall of Fame) to sing the theme to "Viewer Mail".

[9] With his cancer arrested, he continued to work, appearing as a car-dealer in the soap opera EastEnders and recording songs from Fiddler on the Roof and Scrooge.

He enjoyed his final popular success onstage starring in the latter musical, which showed in London and toured British cities including Liverpool, Birmingham, Bristol and Manchester, in the 1990s.

He summed up the previous two decades in remarks from the stage: "I went to Vegas for 22 years, married some absolutely charming women and gave them all my money.

Actress Anneke Wills "began a relationship with Anthony Newley" when she was 17 and working with him on the TV series The Strange World of Gurney Slade.

[citation needed] Newley's life is the subject of a biography by Garth Bardsley called Stop the World (London: Oberon, 2003).

Pure Imagination: The World of Anthony Newley and Leslie Briccuse, devised and directed by Bruce Kimmel, opened at the Pacific Resident Theatre in Venice, California, on 7 December 2013.

[37] Rolling Stone noted that Bowie's singing on the album was "delivered in an overenunciating voice that was deeply indebted to popular English actor-singer Anthony Newley.