Fran Warren – singer with a sense of fun
Fran Warren sings on Granada’s The Variety Show


FRAN WARREN, vivacious singer and musical comedy actress who appears in Granada’s The Variety Show on Thursday, was told by Danny Kaye: “Musical comedy needs you. I’m sure you’ll make it to the top. The best of luck, and I’ll be watching and keeping my fingers crossed.”
Danny’s faith was fully justified. Fran Warren later starred successfully on Broadway in Finian’s Rainbow, As The Girls Go and The Pajama Game.
Her sense of humour frequently causes amusement in the entertainment business. A magazine once offered her 20 cents (1s 6d) a word to write a 1,000-word article on what made her decide to be a singer.
Her answer consisted of nine words: “I like the hours. You owe me 80 cents.” (5s 6d).
This trim 32-year-old insists that she went into show business because she hates to get up in the morning. “Working at night appeals to me,” she says. “I don’t have to get out of bed until the afternoon.”
Now at the peak of her career, Fran came up the hard way, using a combination of talent, brains and hard work.
She decided to try and make a career as a singer when still at high school. “I was much more interested in Duke Ellington and Sidney Bechet than in geometry and medieval history, so I left before completing my second year,” she says.
It was the heyday of swing music, with Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman and Woodie Herman and every small band in the land playing swing.
Although untrained, Fran found she had a natural sense of timing which suited this type of music, and she was soon working her way around with one-night stands in dance-halls and small clubs.
In 1945, she decided she had accumulated enough experience to try for a job with a big band.
She auditioned for Art Mooney in New York and remembers being terrified — “I had a lump in my throat the size of a corn-cob.” But she got the job.
For the first time, Fran was singing regularly on radio. She gained confidence. Her singing improved, and the fan-mail poured in.
When jazzman Charlie Barnet offered her a job some months later, one of her greatest ambitions was realised. She would be singing with one of the best jazzbands in the country.
“I felt as though I was walking on air,” she says. “I knew then that I had a good chance of making it to the top.”
The years that followed were exciting. She loved the pace, the travelling. “There was hardly a town in the whole of the United States we didn’t visit,” she says.
She left the Barnet band to join the famed Claude Thornhill orchestra. The recordings she made with Claude — including Sunday Kind Of Love — have now become collector’s items.
It was while she was with the Thornhill orchestra that Fran developed the “controlled, searing voice” for which she is famed.
“I owe a lot to Claude,” she says. “His patience and understanding gave me a new kind of confidence.”
Having emerged as a popular band singer, Fran thought it was time to take the plunge and “go it alone.”
“I’ve never regretted that decision,” she says. ”I think I’ve proved that show business isn’t the monster it’s made out to be.”