From Bournville to Broadway

It’s no exaggeration to say Laurie Mansfield has been one of the main architects of modern showbusiness. He has been talent manager and agent to some of the biggest names in UK entertainment – Ronnie Corbett, Cilla Black, Michael Crawford, Shirley Bassey, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Jim Davidson, Cannon & Ball, Cleo Laine, Peters & Lee, Basil Brush, Tommy Steele, Mike Yarwood – the list goes on and on. He has also been responsible for some hugely successful West End musicals, most notably Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story, Dreamboats & Petticoats, and Jolson. His astonishing career spans six decades during a time when entertainment has gone through more changes than at any other time in showbusiness history.
He mentored other young talent managers who worked for him, allowing his company, International Artists, to keep up with an ever-changing industry, by representing the next generation of comedians, like Paul Merton, Alan Davies, Julian Clary, Shane Ritchie and Brian Conley.
Laurie, as Life President of the Royal Variety Charity, has regularly played host to senior members of the Royal Family at the annual Royal Variety Performance, including Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, Queen Elizabeth II, Prince William and King Charles.
As you can imagine he has a wealth of great stories about his glittering career in showbusiness, and the sometimes tricky stars he has had to deal with.
He has had to be a showbiz chameleon, rubbing shoulders with the highbrow musical elite and Royalty one minute, and painting the town red with Jim Davidson the next. And along the way smoothing the ruffled feathers of countless temperamental artists, not to mention Rod Hull’s Emu!
He started his career as a junior office boy for Cadbury in Bournville, Birmingham, and ended up as one of the chief architects of entertainment in the UK for sixty years. The pinnacle of his success, he says, was the day his personal brainchild Buddy (the musical) opened on Broadway. Hence the title of this book.
It tells the incredible story of an ordinary unambitious boy from the Midlands, with no showbusiness background whatsoever, conquering the world of entertainment on a global scale. This is Laurie Mansfield’s story, and the inside stories of the many stars he has looked after.