© Futerman Rose & Associates 2024
Born in Bermondsey, London, Sir Thomas Hicks OBE – known professionally as Tommy Steele – was Britain's first rock star, with a meteoric rise to fame in 1956.
Within a year he had begun appearing in movies including his own biopic, The Tommy Steele Story – filmed just four months after his first chart entry – which featured songs he co-wrote with Lionel Bart and Mike Pratt at the start of a long collaboration.
Seamlessly moving into acting, he joined the Old Vic Company and appeared on the West End Stage, notably as Tony Lumpkin in She Stoops to Conquer and in the title role of Hans Christian Andersen.
Through the 60s he starred in many more films, including Half a Sixpence (reprising his West End and Broadway leading role), The Happiest Millionaire (for Walt Disney) and Finian’s Rainbow (his co-star Fred Astaire taught him to dance).
In the decades since he has headlined in shows and musicals from London’s West End to Broadway, Hollywood and around the world – and continues to act and perform to this day, alongside his other accomplishments as a writer and sculptor. He was knighted in the Queen’s 2020 Birthday Honours for services to entertainment and charity.
FRA was delighted to represent Sebastian Lassandro’s biography of Sir Tommy Steele, which was published by Fonthill Media in 2021. Now, Sir Tommy himself has joined our list of clients as he branches out in yet another direction: screenwriting, with an original and very entertaining screen story, Operation Breakheart, A caper movie in the classic tradition of British cinema. Operation Breakheart is set in the dark days of the Blitz in 1941, with a thrilling, twisting plot in which the German High Command with the forced co-operation of an infamous English safecracker,enacts a plan to undermine the confidence of the British people in their government’s ability to protect some of the country’s most valuable assets.