The Philadelphia native performed in a band with Frankie Avalon and had hits with such songs as "Wild One," "Volare" and "Wildwood Days."
Bobby Rydell, the pop singer and onetime teen idol from Philadelphia who starred reverse Ann-Margret and Dick Van Dyke in Bye Bye Birdie, has died. He was 79.
Rydell died Tuesday at Thomas Jefferson College Hospital, WPVI-TV in Philadelphia reported. He was nonetheless touring and scheduled to carry out on the Golden Nugget in Atlantic Metropolis in June.
After hitting it huge with such songs as “Wild One” and his model of “Volare,” Rydell portrayed Hugo Peabody within the George Sidney-directed movie adaptation of Bye Bye Birdie (1963) within the position that Michael J. Pollard originated on Broadway reverse Van Dyke, Susan Watson and Chita Rivera.
The half within the film was significantly expanded to characteristic him, and he and Ann-Margret (as Kim) performed highschool steadies.
“Peabody within the Broadway present was completely nothing, he by no means sang, he by no means danced, he didn’t do something,” he mentioned in 2013. “After we first acquired on the set at Columbia, my script acquired larger and greater and greater day-after-day.”
Robert Louis Ridarelli was born in Philadelphia on April 26, 1942. Inspired by his father, Adrio, he started acting at age 7 in space nightclubs, then gained a TV competitors on Paul Whiteman’s Teen Membership novice program. (It was Whiteman who urged he take the title Rydell.)
He sang and performed drums within the dance band Rocco and the Saints with Frankie Avalon (who performed trumpet), signed with Cameo/Parkway Data and had his first hit with “Kissin’ Time” in 1959.
His discovered additional success that yr with “We Bought Love,” adopted by “Wild One” (which reached No. 2 on the Billboard Scorching 100), “Sway,” “Little Bitty Lady,” “Swingin’ College,” “Ding-a-Ling” and “Volare,” which peaked at No. 4 in the summertime of 1960. That yr, he toured Australia with the Everly Brothers.
In 1961, he turned the youngest performer to headline the famed Copacabana nightclub in New York.
Rydell had different top-20 hits with “Wildwood Days” in 1963 — he known as that “the nationwide anthem of the Jersey Shore” — and “Overlook Him,” which reached No. 4 in January 1964. That yr, he signed with Capitol Data, however his recognition waned amid the British invasion. Nonetheless, he offered within the neighborhood of 25 million information throughout his profession.
“I used to be probably not a rock-and-roll singer,” he informed ThePhiladelphia Inquirer in 2016, when he printed his memoir, Bobby Rydell: Teen Idol on the Rocks. “That’s what you needed to do to make it. I’m an American Songbook man.”
He soldiered on in nightclubs for many years as a preferred performer — he sang with Avalon and Fabian, one other Philly legend, in an oldies act known as “The Golden Boys” — and Rydell Excessive College within the 1978 field workplace smash Grease was named for him.
In 2012, he underwent a double organ transplant, receiving 75 % of a liver and one kidney.
Survivors embrace his spouse, Linda.