US Edition Adam Faith, who has died aged 62, made his mark successively as an actor, pop manager, financial adviser and columnist, and latterly, digital media entrepreneur; prior to any of these personae, however, he was, with Cliff Richard, Britain's first home-grown teen pop idol.
Faith sprang to fame in the late 1950s, after an edition of the television music show 6.5 Special was broadcast from the Soho espresso bar where Faith's skiffle group was the house band.
The slight, chirpy 17-year-old Faith (then performing under his real name, Terence Nelhams), caught the director's eye, and he soon had both a contract with EMI and a residency on another television programme, Drumbeat. There he developed his distinctive, if limited, vocal style, a hiccupping delivery strongly influenced by Buddy Holly, with whom his promoters were apt to compare him.
Having picked a new sobriquet from a book of boys' and girls' names, Faith was then teamed with songwriter Johnny Worth and with arranger John Barry, whose pizzicato strings were the most memorable element of the two No1 hits that swiftly followed, What Do You Want (If You Don't Want Money) in late 1959 and Poor Me the next year.
The former alone sold more than 600,000 copies in Britain, and during the next seven years Faith would enjoy another 23 hit records, amassing a considerable fortune in the process. By the time he was 20 he owned a Rolls-Royce, a Jaguar, and a 14-bedroomed house in Surrey.
Faith was no revolutionary force in music, nor did he ever rival the status and appeal of the dominant artist of the time, Elvis Presley, but he was perhaps (unlike, say, Tommy Steele or Richard himself) the first British singer who genuinely seemed to represent something of the adolescent passions with which Presley was identified and which would prove the formative influence on early pop music.
Several years before Mick Jagger's celebrated interview with William Rees-Mogg and other members of the Establishment, Faith acquitted himself notably intelligently when quizzed by John Freeman on Face to Face in December 1960, revealing that he was earning about £1,000 a week - roughly 10 times more than a Cabinet Minister according to Freeman. Three years later, Faith was earning double that.
He was very much a pointer to the future shape of the 1960s. He was one of the first of the new wave of talent to retain his working-class diction, and he helped to persuade adults to take teenagers - armed with their new spending power - more seriously. He became, too, something of a spokesman for youth, notably when, in 1962, the Archbishop of York, Dr Donald Coggan, accused him of placing too much emphasis on sex in his (in truth rather tame) records, a point the two subsequently debated on television.
Faith's wafer-thin pop sound was soon overtaken in popularity by Merseybeat, and by the mid-Sixties he had virtually given up singing, but by then he had already helped to usher in a new era in both British music and social history.
The third of five children, he was born Terence Nelhams in London on June 23 1940. His father was a coach driver, his mother a cleaner, and he grew up on a council estate in Acton, west London. Aged 13, and by now known to his friends as "Tel", he was earning £3 a week as a paper boy, while working evenings in a factory.
Interviewed years later by his friend Michael Parkinson, he told how he farmed out his Saturday paper round to another boy, while he made twice as much elsewhere.
On leaving school at 15, young Nelhams found work as a messenger boy at Rank's head office. In his spare time, he practised with a skiffle outfit he had joined, The Worried Men; their first performance, at a Wandsworth boys' club, brought in 15 shillings.
At Rank, he progressed to assistant film editor, and when the hits began to dry up - his last success came in 1966 - he began to explore his interest in film and acting. He had already had modest parts in moderate pictures such as Beat Girl (1960) and What a Whopper! (1962), but he now began to study the craft in provincial repertory theatre, eventually working his way up to appearing opposite Dame Sibyl Thorndike in Emlyn Williams's Night Must Fall.
Recognition of his acting talents first came, however, on television, when in 1971 he was cast as the eponymous Budgie. In the series, written by Keith Waterhouse, Faith played a small-time criminal, and thereafter, though the parts kept coming, they were usually roles as cockney rogues or flashy pop types, as in the film Stardust (1974), about the rise and fall of a pop singer, in which Faith played David Essex's manager.
This latter role was one that Faith was by now also playing away from the screen. It was he who had discovered Sandie Shaw, and in 1972 he became manager to another singer he had nurtured, Leo Sayer. The diminutive Sayer sold several million records over the course of the next five years, making Faith more money than he had gained even from his own pop career.
Faith astutely invested his income in property in the 1970s, and in the mid-1980s decided to share his insights into the market with others. Working in jeans from a table in Fortnum & Mason's tea rooms, he dispensed financial advice to celebrity clients. At first, as the economy steamed ahead, all went well, and he was even given a weekly financial column by The Mail on Sunday.
In 1991, however, it was revealed that Michael Winner had lost £1 million after investing it, on Faith's say-so, with Roger Levitt, the financier who was declared bankrupt that year. Faith himself had dropped £7 million. Winner remarked that Faith was to fiscal advice "what Frank Bruno is to English literature".
Faith's misfortunes did not end there. He lost money in the Lloyd's insurance scandals of the early 1990s, and in 2001 was himself declared bankrupt following the collapse of The Money Channel, a digital television service dedicated to financial information which he had set up two years earlier, and which he lamented had been a "victim of the dotcom collapse", costing him a reported £32 million.
Nonetheless, Faith remained resilient, one of his abiding characteristics. In 1974, he had shrugged off the effects of a near-fatal car accident in which he badly injured a leg, and in 1987 had quickly regained his customary spark after heart surgery.
Despite his consultancy work, Faith also found time to return periodically to acting. In 1988, he appeared in the West End in a stage version of Budgie, but his best remembered work of this later period was the romantic television series Love Hurts (1991-95), in which he starred with Zoe Wanamaker. He was also seen last year on television in The House that Jack Built, with Gillian Taylforth, playing a property developer.
Although the press discovered in the mid-1980s that Faith had been having an affair with the tennis player Chris Evert, he was otherwise a rather discrete man, and invariably amiable, enthusiastic and energetic, especially in the pursuit of cash. "I've always liked money," he said. "I worked hard to get it, but there's nothing wrong with a bit of graft."
Adam Faith died on Saturday. He had suffered a heart attack after performing in the play Love and Marriage at the Regent Theatre, Stoke-on-Trent on Friday night.
He married, in 1967, Jackie Irving. She survives him, together with their daughter.