Vanda King

As at September 28th, 2026 Vanda is just getting out of intensive care and will be sending us more info as she recovers.

Vanda King was born in Perth, Scotland, in 1943 and came to Canada with her family in 1951, when she was eight. The Kings settled in Scarborough, and by her early teens Vanda was singing rock 'n' roll around Toronto.

In early 1958, at fourteen, she signed with Glory Records of New York. Her first session, on February 19, 1958, produced 'Ooh, Whatcha Do!' and 'Randy', with Toronto bandleader Denny Vaughan writing the A-side and leading the orchestra. Compo issued the single in Canada on Apex, in its Specialty Series, and Glory released it in the United States. A second single followed that year, 'Baby Dontcha Leave-A-Me' backed with 'Kiss After Kiss', again with Vaughan's orchestra; Glory's American pressing retitled the A-side 'Baby Dontcha Leave Me Now'. Toronto newspapers reported that an Ed Sullivan Show appearance and a film part were in the works for the teenager, though the broadcast itself has not been confirmed.

Television became her real stage. From October 1958 to June 1959 she was a regular on CBC's Saturday Date with Billy O'Connor, singing alongside O'Connor and Allan Blye in the half-hour that led into Saturday night hockey. O'Connor's programs were known for bringing new singers forward, and King joined a line of discoveries that included Juliette and The Two Tones, the duo that featured a young Gordon Lightfoot.

After the 1965 season she replaced Jean Christopher on Nightcap, CBC's late-night satire and music show. She joined Billy Van, Bonnie Brooks, Al Hamel and June Sampson in the sketches, with Guido Basso's band on the music, Chris Bearde writing and Terry Kyne producing and directing. The show poked fun at federal and provincial politicians at a time when that was rarely done on Canadian television, and it ran until May 1967. King married singer Dave Higgins during her Nightcap years. She also turned up on the 1967 Wayne & Shuster Comedy Special and co-starred with Larry Zolf on CBC's Sunday, where the Toronto Star reported she drew the line at rubbing noses with him in one sketch.

Off camera, King became the first Diamond Lil at the Skyline Hotel on Toronto's airport strip, playing a brassy saloon hostess who sang the ragtime and vaudeville songs of the turn of the century. CTV built a series around the character. Diamond Lil's premiered in September 1969 with King as hostess and star of a lively saloon full of dancers, comics and a Dixieland band, made by the same production team as the network's hit Pig and Whistle. Its 10:30 Thursday night slot suited the show's older audience poorly, and it lasted one season. One Toronto Star critic blamed the scripts, writing that the show was doomed from the start by "a poverty of brains." The series left behind the 1969 Monique album CTV's Diamond Lil's Starring Vanda King, recorded at Bay Recording Studios in Toronto and produced by Tony DiMaria and Bill Gilliland, with King working through 'Hello My Baby', 'You Made Me Love You', 'Royal Garden Blues' and a string of period medleys.

She kept busy after the series ended, taking convention dates and supper-club engagements and guesting on The Barbara McNair Show, where she sang 'With Pen in Hand'. In 1972 CBC's broadcast recording series captured the singer she had become. On LM 130 she sang 'In A Long White Room' and Bobbie Gentry's 'Papa Won't You Let Me Go To Town' with the Guido Basso Orchestra, arranged by Rick Wilkins and Rob McConnell, and LM 131 paired 'Moods of My Man' with the standard 'Teach Me Tonight', again with Basso's orchestra and arranged by Jim Pirie and Jimmy Dale. She was a long way from 'Ooh, Whatcha Do!', working easily across pop, jazz and nightclub standards with some of Toronto's best studio players.

In 1969, the same year Diamond Lil's went to air, King started a piano sales and restoration business. By the mid-1980s she had left performing, and a Toronto Star photographer found her at 42 seated at a grand piano in her Etobicoke restoration shop. The company went online in 1997 and grew into Piano Showcase, a division of Vanda King Entertainment Ltd., selling piano covers, dollies, benches, parts and tools across North America. King is its president and CEO, and the business is now in its third family generation.

-Robert Williston