- Helen Trivia: She was born on September 28, 1946 in the East End district of Bethnal Green, London
- Helen Trivia: She is the granddaughter of Russian Jewish immigrants; her parents, were piece-workers in the garment industry...
- ... Too poor to own a record player, she had to borrow a neighbour's player to hear her first single.
- Helen Trivia: As a child she sang with her brother Ron occasionally in his youth club skiffle group. She had a deep timbre to her voice,...
- ... unusual in a girl not yet in her teens: School friends gave her the nickname "Foghorn".
- Helen Trivia: At age ten, Shapiro was a singer with "Susie and the Hula Hoops"...
- ... with her cousin, 60s singer, Susan Singer in a school band which included Marc Bolan (then using his real name of Mark Feld) as guitarist.
- Helen Trivia: At 13 she started singing lessons at the Maurice Burman School of Modern Pop Singing, based in London's Baker Street.
- Helen Trivia:In 1961, aged fourteen, she had a UK No. 3 hit with her first single, "Don't Treat Me Like a Child"...
- ... and two number one hits in the UK, "You Don't Know" and "Walkin' Back to Happiness".
- Helen Trivia: Walkin' Back To Happiness was a UK chart topper and it also spent one week at #100 in the US chart...
- ... Shapiro's only chart entry in Billboard top 100.
- Helen Trivia: Ironically, Shapiro never wanted to record Walkin' Back To Happiness, as she felt it sounded too corny and old-fashioned to appeal to her fans.
- Helen Trivia: She had a No. 2 hit in 1962 with "Tell Me What He Said", achieving her first four single releases in the top three of the UK Singles Chart.
- Helen Trivia: Her mature voice made her an overnight sensation, as well as the youngest female chart topper in the UK.
- Helen Trivia: Shapiro's final UK Top Ten hit single was with the ballad "Little Miss Lonely", which peaked at No. 8 for two weeks in 1962.
- Helen Trivia: Before she was sixteen years old, Shapiro had been voted Britain's "Top Female Singer".
- Helen Trivia: During a national tour of Britain in 1963, the Beatles was as one of her supporting acts....
- ... During the course of the tour, the Beatles had their first hit single and John Lennon and Paul McCartney wrote the song...
- ... "Misery" for her, but Shapiro did not record the composition.
- Helen Trivia: But, when "From Me To You" became the Beatles second #1 song in a row, the positions reversed in mid-tour,...
- ... with Helen opening for the Beatles. According to John Lennon, she was very gracious about it, and she was quite freindly with Paul McCartney and John....
- ... And Paul and John would later be guests on Helen's UK TV show from time to time.
- Helen Trivia: In 1962, she appeared as herself in the Billy Fury film Play It Cool,...
- ... and played the lead female role in Richard Lester's movie, It's Trad, Dad!, which co-starred another early 60s hitmaker, Craig Douglas.
- Helen Trivia: By the time she was in her late teens, as the Beatles took America by storm, her career as a pop singer was on the wane.
- Helen Trivia: Between 1984 and 2001, she toured extensively with legendary British jazz trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton and his band,...
- ... whilst still performing her own jazz and pop concerts. Her one-woman show "Simply Shapiro" ran from 1999 to the end of 2002,...
- ... when she finally bade farewell to show business.
- Helen Trivia: She has been married since 31 August 1988 to John Judd (real name, John Williams), an actor with numerous roles in British television and cinema.
- Helen Trivia: Soon after her 40th birthday, becomming a Messianic jew, she announced that she believed Jesus was the Messiah of Israel.
