Born to an Irish Roman Catholic family that loved music, Mary O’Brien learned to sing at home. Dusty Springfield began her solo career in 1963 with the upbeat pop hit, “I Only Want To Be With You”. Her following hits included “I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself”, “Wishin’ and Hopin’”, and “You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me” . The Dusty Springfield songs are still very popular even today.

A fan of American pop music, she campaigned to bring the little-known soul singers to a wider British audience by devising and hosting the first British performances of the top-selling Motown Records artists in 1965. Her rendition of “The Look of Love”, written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, was featured in the James Bond movie Casino Royale (1967) and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Song in 1967.

The marked changes of pop music in the mid-1960s left female pop singers out of fashion. To boost her credibility as a soul artist, Dusty Springfield went to Memphis, Tennessee, to record an album of pop and soul music with the Atlantic Records main production team. This album, Dusty in Memphis, earned Springfield a nomination for the Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance in 1970, and it received the Grammy Hall of Fame award in 2001. International readers and viewers polls list the record among the one hundred greatest albums of all time. This album’s standout song, “Son of a Preacher Man”, was an international Top 10 hit in 1969. After that album, Springfield’s pop music success dipped for many years. In 1987, collaborations with the Pet Shop Boys returned her to the Top 20 of the British and American charts with the three singles “What Have I Done to Deserve This?”, “Nothing Has Been Proved”, and “In Private”. In 1995, Ms. Springfield was diagnosed by her physicians with serious breast cancer.