Susan Boyle Biography / Pictures

Susan Boyle (born 1 April 1961) is a Scottish singer and church volunteer who came to public attention on 11 April 2009, when she appeared as a contestant on the third series of Britain's Got Talent. Susan found fame when she sang "I Dreamed a Dream" from Les Misérables in the competition's first round.

Before she sang, both the audience and the judges appeared to express scepticism based on her unpolished appearance. In contrast, her vocal performance was so well received that she has been dubbed "The Woman Who Shut Up Simon Cowell". She received a standing ovation from the live audience, and unanimous praise from the judges. The audition was recorded in January 2009 at the Clyde Auditorium in Glasgow, Scotland, and was first broadcast on Saturday, 11 April 2009, in Britain.

The juxtaposition of the reception to her voice with the audience's first impression of her triggered global interest. Articles about her appeared in newspapers all over the world, while the numbers who watched videos of her audition set an online record. By 20 April 2009, nine days after her televised debut, viral videos of her audition, subsequent interviews of her, and her 1999 rendition of "Cry Me a River" had been viewed over 100 million times on the Internet. Cowell is reported to be setting up a contract with Susan with his Syco Music company label, a subsidiary of Sony Music.

Biography

Susan was born in Blackburn, West Lothian, Scotland to Patrick Boyle, a storeman at the British Leyland factory in Bathgate, and Bridget, a shorthand typist, who were both Irish immigrants. The youngest in a family of four brothers and six sisters, of whom only six survive, Susan was born when her mother was 47. The birth was difficult, and Susan was briefly deprived of oxygen. She was diagnosed as having learning difficulties, and was bullied as a child. She was labeled "Susie Simple" at school but quickly learned to overcome those who derided her.

After leaving school with few qualifications, she was employed for the only time in her life as a trainee cook in the kitchen of West Lothian College for six months, and took part in government training schemes. She would visit the theatre from time to time to listen to professional singers, and performed at a number of local venues. She took singing lessons from voice coach Fred O'Neil. In 1995, she auditioned for Michael Barrymore's My Kind of People, which was looking for contestants at the Braehead Shopping Centre in Glasgow, but she said she was too nervous to make a good impression. She attended Edinburgh Acting School, and also took part in the Edinburgh Fringe. In 1999 she recorded "Cry Me a River" for a charity CD funded by the local council to commemorate the Millennium.

Susan has never married; her father died in the 1990s, and her siblings had left home, leaving Susan to look after her ageing mother, who died in 2007 at the age of 91. Susan still lives in the family home, a four-bedroom council house, with her ten-year-old cat, Pebbles. Boyle's devotion to caring for her mother was such that she did not have any time for herself. One neighbour reported that Susan struggled to cope with the loss of her mother, stating that she "wouldn't come out for three or four days or answer the door or phone".

At the time of her Britain's Got Talent audition, Susan was unemployed, yet active as a volunteer with the Roman Catholic church of Our Lady of Lourdes in Blackburn. She said during an interview just before she sang on the talent show, she said she had "never been kissed" but later said "It was just banter and it has been blown way out of proportion."

The earliest known footage of Boyle's talents comes from her parents' golden wedding party, where at 25 she sang "I Don't Know How to Love Him" from the musical Jesus Christ Superstar.

Susan recorded a version of "Cry Me a River" for a compilation charity CD entitled Music for a Millennium Celebration, Sounds of West Lothian, which was produced in 1999 at a school in Whitburn, West Lothian; only 1,000 copies were pressed. This recording was released onto the web in the week after 11 April 2009, and gained immediate acclaim, with the New York Post writing that this showed that Susan was not a "one trick pony" and predicted the original compilation would be a valuable collector's item. Hello! magazine stated that the recording "cemented her status" as a singing star.

In 1999, Susan used "all her savings" to pay for a professionally cut demo tape, which she later sent to record companies, radio talent competitions, local and national TV and which has now been released on the Internet. It consisted of "Cry Me a River" and her version of "Killing Me Softly with His Song". Susan gave away a few copies to her close friends.

Her mother had always encouraged her to enter local singing competitions, which she won several times, and tried to persuade her daughter to enter Britain's Got Talent, urging her to take the risk of singing in front of an audience larger than her parish church. Former coach O'Neil has said Susan abandoned an audition for The X Factor because she believed people were being chosen for their looks, and that she almost abandoned her plan to enter Britain's Got Talent. O'Neil told The Scotsman: "I remember a phone call late last year when she said she was too old and that it was a young person's game". O'Neil persuaded her to go to the audition.

Susan has said she did not feel ready to do it until after her mother's death, saying that it was that event which propelled her to go on Britain's Got Talent and seek a musical career as her way of paying a tribute to her mother. Her performance on the show was the first time she had sung since then.

In August 2008, Susan became aware that Britain's Got Talent would be holding auditions, she applied and, after the preliminary audition in October, was accepted for the taped audition, which took place in Glasgow on 21 January 2009. Susan performed a rendition of "I Dreamed a Dream" from Les Misérables in the first round of the third series of Britain's Got Talent, which aired on 11 April and was watched by an average of 10.3 million viewers. This performance was widely reported, and millions of people viewed a video of her singing on YouTube. The strength of this reaction reportedly shocked and amazed Boyle, who later said she was "gobsmacked".

Susan is well aware that the audience on Britain's Got Talent was initially hostile to her because of her appearance, but she has refused to change her image:

“ I know what they were thinking, but why should it matter as long as I can sing? It’s not a beauty contest. ”
—Susan Boyle, The Sunday Times

Many British newspapers carried articles on Boyle's performance and subsequent Internet coverage. The Sun writer Colin Robertson gave her the nickname "Paula Potts" in reference to the contest's Series one winner, the opera singer Paul Potts.

International news outlets also carried stories on her, including among others, The Times of India, Germany's Der Spiegel, China's Xinhua News Agency, Brazil's Zero Hora, Israel's Ynet, and the Arabic-language Al Arabiya.

In the U.S., ABC News coverage suggested that Susan may be "Britain's newest pop sensation", and the network's Entertainment section ran the headline The Woman Who Shut Up Simon Cowell. Several commentators have drawn parallels between Boyle's performance and that of Paul Potts, another unexpected singing talent who also rose to fame on Britain's Got Talent, with Forbes magazine predicting that Susan could follow in Potts' footsteps and enjoy a successful and profitable career.

Within the week following her performance on Britain's Got Talent, Susan was a guest on STV's The Five Thirty Show. She was interviewed.