Vegas star dies alone

9th December 2011

The singer often touted as the “voice of the People’s Republic” died on December 5 in circumstances that remain laced with mystery.

Violetta Villas, who was born Czeslawa Cieslak to Polish parents working in Belgium, passed away in her home in the southern Polish village of Lewin Klodzki at the age of 73.

A coloratura soprano, Villas had become a cabaret star in Las Vegas, performing with the likes of Frank Sinatra, before she returned to Poland in 1970. When the communist authorities refused to approve her passport, effectively marooning her in Poland, she concentrated on the Polish music scene becoming one of the stars of the socialist era.

An autopsy carried out on the dead singer found that she had broken her leg a few days before her death and complications arising from this may have contributed to her demise. How she broke her leg and why it was not seen by a doctor, as she would have been in pain, remain unclear.

“Before her death she must have been very weak,” said a doctor familiar with the case, quoted by the Gazeta Wroclawska newspaper. “Her body was emaciated. She must have been in bed for several days.”

According to the paper, the autopsy ruled out murder or any third party involvement in her death but the report on her death will be handed to prosecutors.

The pitiful circumstances apparently contributing to Villas’s death were compounded by news of her domestic life in Lewin Klodzki. Despite once being an international music star and one of the most recognisable faces in Poland her house was shabby and dirty, and few people visited.

“I last saw her a few weeks ago,” Henry Szczpykowski, the village mayor, told Gazeta Wroclawska. “She wasn’t too bad but the conditions she lived in, to put it mildly, were not the best. I even proposed helping her with a renovation, and a visit to a spa while the work was in process.”

It also emerged that she had not spoken with her only child for five years.

“She loved me in her own way but she always placed her career first and did not really know how to look after a child,” said 55-year-old Krzysztof Gospodarek. “It kind of overwhelmed her.”

In a sad twist, Mr Gospodarek added that he had learnt about his mother’s death from the television.