Cilla Black's final wish was to be buried as 'Cilla the singer'

A funeral service will be held at St Mary’s Church in Woolton on Thursday before Cilla is laid to rest next to her parents

Cilla Black: Her final wish was to be buried as 'Cilla the singer'

TV icon and singer Cilla Black will be buried as 'Cilla the singer', her spokesman has revealed.

The music and television legend will be laid to rest next to her parents after a public funeral next week which thousands are expected to attend in Liverpool .
Cilla, who died in Spain, will be buried in her hometown.
A funeral service will be held at St Mary’s Church in Woolton on Thursday before she is laid to rest next to her parents.
Cilla’s body will then be laid to rest, at a private ceremony in Allerton Cemetery alongside her parents, dad John White and mum Priscilla.

And Cilla’s spokesman Nick Fiveash, when asked about the decision to bury Cilla next to her parents, Nick said: “The boys are doing everything following her wishes.
“What I know as her friend and her publicist for the last 20 years is she always said she wanted to be buried and she wanted on her headstone ‘Here lies Cilla the singer’.

 

Singing sensation: Cilla Black, front centre, in Drumchapel in 1968

“If you read interviews over the years, there was always a bit where she used to say ‘I don’t want to put down my TV presenting career but I have always thought of myself first and foremost as a singer’.”
Cilla died of a stroke after falling and hitting her head at her Spanish villa on August 1, aged 72.
She was known for singing hits in the Sixties where she hung out in Liverpool’s Cavern club, before moving into TV where she presented huge hits including Blind Date and Surprise Surprise.

 

Sixties star: Cilla Black leaves her parents home in Liverpool on August 30 1968

But in an interview last year with the Mirror she said experiencing her mum suffer from the progressive bone disease osteoporosis and endure a slow and painful death in 1996 had made her not want to live a longer life if it meant being in constant pain.
“I was living in London and I can’t remember the times I’d take a plane up to Liverpool to see my mum, when she had very bad osteoporosis,” she says.

Heartbroken: Cilla Black at the funeral of her mother at St Marys Church in Woolton, Liverpool

“She said to me once, ‘I’m trying to die but I can’t.’ Oh God, it was heart-breaking. The brain was great but the body wasn’t.
“Eventually she did die when she was 84. It wasn’t a good experience. I think that’s what made me feel like this. My biggest fear is going like that when I can’t control my body.”
The church where the service will take place is also where Cilla married her beloved Bobby on March 6, 1969.
Allerton Cemetery is also where John Lennon’s mum Julia was buried in 1958