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Bobby Willis

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Manager of his wife's meteoric career in pop music and television

Bobby Willis's business acumen helped take Cilla Black from their working-class Liverpool roots to being one of the richest women in Britain, worth a reported £12m, and the highest-paid female presenter on television. Willis, who has died from cancer at the age of 57, was Cilla's husband for more than 30 years and her manager for the majority of a career in which she became a household name with TV shows such as Blind Date, Surprise! Surprise! and Moment of Truth.

Born and brought up in a working-class family in Liverpool, Willis learned early on how to make things run smoothly. His mother died from heart trouble when he was only 11, and although Bobby was the youngest in the family, he would do all the shopping and cooking - after he had come home from school. Eight months after his mother's funeral, one of his brothers died of cancer.

By the age of 17, Willis was working behind the bakery counter in the local Woolworths, but he was singing and writing songs in his spare time. In the early 1960s he met Priscilla White, an exuberant, leggy girl with a Mary Quant bob who was working as a part-time waitress at the Zodiac coffee bar in Duke Street. Again he displayed his budding talent for management: he would take her on dates in a borrowed Crawford's biscuit van, managing to convince her that his father owned the entire bakery.

By the time Cilla was on the books of the Beatles' manager Brian Epstein (who had persuaded her to take the stage name of Cilla Black), Willis was both her boyfriend and roadie, and had written Shy of Love - the B-side of her early single, Paul McCartney's Love of the Loved. During the 1960s Cilla had three number one hit records, including a cover version of the Burt Bacharach/Dionne Warwick hit, Anyone Who Had a Heart. This, and her close association with the Beatles, meant that her marriage to Willis at Marylebone registry office in London in January 1969 was a press bunfight; a second ceremony, at St Mary's Roman Catholic church in Liverpool a month later, went practically unnoticed.

Two years earlier, Epstein had died and Willis had taken over as Cilla's manager. Although Epstein had secured Cilla's first major TV deal - her own variety series with the BBC - it was Willis who made the most of her natural talent for the rapidly growing medium. Cilla had always shone in variety and pantomime and, from the 1970s, Willis developed her popularity with family audiences.

Show business managers tend to be disliked by most people in the industry, since they have to secure the interests of temperamental clients. Yet despite Willis's perpetual presence at Cilla's side (she referred to him as her constantly "reassuring face"), he was liked - partly perhaps for his habit of opening Bollinger at 10 in the morning, but mostly for his straightforwardness. He was also respected as a shrewd negotiator: Cilla's high-earning deal with LWT was renegotiated by Willis every two years, and her fee for Moment of Truth - bought by Willis from Japanese television for his own production company - made her £50,000 a show.

Fiercely protective, Willis helped to keep his wife's public and private lives separate. She never carried cash, never wrote cheques and refused to record a show unless Willis was in the building; she once said they had secret signals to indicate if she was talking too much on air. If anything went wrong, he would immediately be down on the studio floor. They were apart for only three nights in 30 years of marriage - when their children were born - and Willis never gave interviews on his own. Away from the studios, Cilla insisted on being called Mrs Willis. They had three sons, Robert John, Ben and Jack, and in 1975, a stillborn daughter.

In July 1970 they had moved into a 16-acre property in Buckinghamshire, but said they always thought of Liverpool as home. Working-class with Tory sympathies, the couple appeared to transfer the ideology of a close-knit Liverpool family to their domestic and financial life; people outside the family circle were treated with a certain amount of suspicion. Willis only expanded the business when he took on their eldest son Robert as an agent at their west London offices.

Despite their wealth, when at home the couple seemed to lead an "ordinary family life"; at Christmas, Bobby would do four stuffings for the turkey while Cilla roasted the potatoes. (Though they had four Christmas trees, one for each of the largest rooms in the house, and Bobby refused to use any sausage meat unless it came from Harrods.)

As well as the family home, the couple had flats in London and Barbados and a villa in Spain. In his rare moments of spare time, Willis played golf and kept budgerigars and cockatiels, and once said he would only bother to do the National Lottery if it was a roll-over week.

He leaves his wife and three sons.

Bobby Willis, show business manager, born January 25 1942; died October 23 1999

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