Iris Williams obituary: Welsh singer compared to Shirley Bassey

Times

18-07-2025

In the pantheon of celebrated Welsh female singers, comparisons between Iris Williams and Shirley Bassey were inevitable. Born barely a dozen miles apart in south Wales, both were mixed race, born to white mothers and black fathers, and their chosen career paths followed similar courses.
Both possessed big, rich voices and a classy stage elan that stood out on the club circuit at a time when black or mixed-race British singers were a rarity. Both recorded Cleo Laine and Johnny Dankworth's He Was Beautiful, although it was Williams's version that was the Top 20 hit. Popular at royal command performances, both were recognised in the honours list, Bassey first as CBE and then as a Dame, and Williams, who in 2004 was appointed OBE.
Yet much as Williams admired Bassey, she found the constant comparisons irritating. 'We're both dark-skinned and come from the Cardiff area but it ends there for me and my style is completely different,' she insisted. 'She is a great singer, with a wonderful voice, but I hate being compared to her and have tried everything to rid myself of it. I want to be me.'
Certainly, there were differences as well as the obvious similarities. In Williams's own words she was not as 'gregarious' as Bassey, less inclined towards 'the big belter numbers' and in the view of many her singing boasted a greater emotional depth. 'I don't use half of the voice that she does because I don't need to — as I see it, I am telling a story,' she noted.
Yet when she chose to let rip there was no doubting the strength, power and sheer vivacity of her delivery. Terry Wogan, who championed her on his radio shows, was a particular fan of the creamy resonance of what he called her 'basso profundo'.
Her singing took her from the factory floor to the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama and then into the charts and to her own BBC series. She later moved to the United States but remained proud of her Welsh heritage. Alongside Bassey, Tom Jones and a 13-year-old Charlotte Church, she sang at a concert to mark the opening of the Welsh National Assembly in 1999 in front of an audience that included Elizabeth II, Prince Philip and the future King Charles.
'Wales will always be my great passion,' she said. When she was the subject of a 2002 documentary film on Welsh TV, she gamely insisted on being interviewed in Welsh. She had learnt Welsh as a child but had barely spoken the language in decades and 'brushed up' by practising on her dog Mimi. She was subsequently admitted to the Gorsedd of Bards at the National Eisteddfod of Wales.
Her two marriages, to Clive Brandy and Edward Jones, both of whom served as her manager, ended in divorce. 'A lot of female singers make the mistake of making their husband their manager,' she said. 'It generally doesn't work because you should be able to go home and leave work behind. When you're married to your manager all you do is talk showbusiness.' She is survived by her son Blake from her first marriage.
She was born in 1946 in Rhydyfelin, near Potypridd, in south Wales, the illegitimate daughter of an African-American GI who was stationed in Britain during the Second World War and who met her mother — who was already married — in a local dance hall. A romance blossomed but the taboo-breaking relationship was doomed and the daughter who resulted was given up for adoption.
Williams spent her first five years in a children's home until she was fostered by Bronwen Llewellyn, a miner's wife from Tonyrefail, who encouraged her to sing. She was subsequently reunited with her birth mother and a half-brother in the mid-1980s after she found them via an advert placed in a local newspaper.
Growing up as the only black child in her village was 'a bit of a problem', but she argued that the prejudice made her tougher, which served as an asset as she began to 'mingle into the world'. On leaving school she worked in a glove factory in Llantrisant, and when it closed and she found herself without an income her former piano teacher put her name forward for a scholarship at the Welsh College of Music & Drama in Cardiff. She won a place and after appearing on the Welsh BBC pop music TV show Disc A Dawn, she had a hit in the country of her birth in 1971 with Pererin Wyf, a Welsh-language version of Amazing Grace.
Three years later she won the annual Cân i Gymru (A Song for Wales) competition. Her breakthrough outside Wales came in 1979 when she had a Top 20 UK hit with He Was Beautiful, a song based on the theme from the film The Deer Hunter.
During the 1980s she ran a pub near Ascot named The Pheasant Plucker with her first husband while continuing to appear on the nightclub circuit. By the early 1990s she had moved to New York, where she appeared in concert with Bob Hope and Rosemary Clooney.
She also sang at gala benefits for the clinics started by Betty Ford, whose husband, the former US president Gerald Ford, helped her to access classified files to find her birth father. By the time she discovered his identity he was already dead and she did not contact his family. Suspecting that they did not know of her existence, she had no wish to cause any posthumous upset.
In later years she was a popular entertainer on cruise ships, singing jazz standards and show tunes and joking with audiences that Bassey, who was a decade older, was her 'younger sister'.
Iris Williams, singer, was born on April 20, 1946. She died of undisclosed causes on July 9, 2025, aged 79