Yana

About

Few British singers of the 1950s had quite the presence Yana did. Born Pamela Guard, she became one of the most recognisable faces on television during the late 1950s, racking up over 200 TV appearances across the US, Canada and Mexico in a single year after Bob Hope called her "England's answer to Marilyn Monroe". Her signature song "Climb Up the Wall" is counted among the top 30 British pop songs of the decade, and she appeared in films like The Cockleshell Heroes and Interpol alongside Hollywood names such as Victor Mature and Anita Ekberg. Yana had her own BBC show, The Yana Show, which featured an early appearance from Ronnie Corbett, and she was a fixture on Sunday Night at the London Palladium. Her stage persona was famously extravagant, white poodles in tow, and Ronnie Corbett later quipped in his autobiography that her neckline was something that mostly had its downs. Despite all that star power, her earnings from records reportedly amounted to only about £100 in total, a grim illustration of how record contracts worked for British artists of the era.