John Farnham and his wife, Jillian Billman, have two kids together. But they are both sons.
The famous singer was just told that she has cancer, so she was taken to the hospital right away for surgery. He had surgery that took 12 hours, and he is now getting better.
Does John Farnham’s wife, Jillian Billman, have a daughter?
Since 1973, John Farnham has been married to Jillian Billman. He met her when he was in the play Charlie Girl. She was a dancer.
People say that the couple has a daughter, but the truth is that they only have two sons. Robert and James are the names of their two sons.
Robert is a well-known actor who has been in movies like Queen of the Damned and The Wilde Girls. He also went to the National Musicoz Awards in 2010.
He is also a singer, a composer, and a musician who plays in different bands, including Nana Zhami. On the Main Event tour, he also played with his dad’s backing band.
In the same way, there isn’t much known about James. But he is active on Instagram, where he usually posts pictures of himself with his family.
John Farnham’s cancer has been found.
Cancer has been found in John Farnham. He had talked about smoking before and said he started when he was 14 years old.
After being in Jesus Christ Superstar in 1992, he quit smoking “cold turkey,” but in 2004, he began smoking cigars again. And right before he turned 70, he made the decision to stop smoking.
But a little more than a month after he turned 73, he found out he has a cancerous growth. But he got better because his wife made him go to the doctor for a checkup. He was taken to the hospital soon after that to have surgery.
The news came after John’s manager and longtime friend Glenn Wheatley died in February. When he died, at age 74, it was because of problems with Covid-19.
On August 23, 2022, the family told the public about the news. Even John put out a statement saying that the diagnosis is something that many people deal with every day and that many people have been in his shoes.
He gave them his assurance and thanked them for having the best specialists in health care in Victoria.
John Farnham is getting better after surgery. Here’s a health update
John Farnham, who is 73 years old, had a long 12-hour surgery on Tuesday to remove the tumor. Twenty-six doctors and nurses worked on the surgery.
According to Daily Mail, during the long surgery, a big piece of his jaw had to be taken out. This may mean that the famous singer will never sing again. His wife said that the cancer was found in his mouth and was successfully taken out.
After the surgery went well, the family said something in a statement. They said that the singer’s condition in the ICU was stable and that he would stay there for a while until he got better.
Jill and her two sons thanked the doctors and nurses who did the surgery. They were blown away by the amazing group of doctors and nurses who helped them through the hard times.
Early years
John Peter Farnham’s parents, John Peter Farnham Sr. and Rose (née Pemberton) Farnham, had him on July 1, 1949, in Dagenham, England. Jean and Jacqueline are his sisters, and Steven is his younger brother. Farnham was born and raised in the United Kingdom for the first ten years of his life. In 1959, his family moved to Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. He went to Yarraman Park State School, which is now called Yarraman Oaks Primary School. He also went to Lyndale Primary School and Lyndale High School.
From The Mavericks to Strings Unlimited (1964–1967),
As Johnny Farnham, he played on weekends with a local band called The Mavericks while he was still in school in 1964. The band could play five songs. Late in 1965, he was asked to be the lead singer for the band Strings Unlimited. The band was made up of only string instruments, and they played regularly at a local hotel.
After making it to the state finals of the Hoadley’s Battle of the Sounds in 1966, they recorded a three-track demo tape with Farnham on vocals, Stewart Male on lead guitar, Barry Roy on rhythm guitar, Mike Foenander on keyboards, Joe Cincotta on bass, and Peter Foggie on drums.
On April 29, 1967, the pop singer Bev Harrell played in Cohuna, and Strings Unlimited was the band that backed her up. Darryl Sambell, who managed Harrell and was also her boyfriend at the time, liked Farnham’s voice and offered to be his manager. Farnham first played in Adelaide, which is where Sambell grew up. He then recorded a light advertising jingle called “Susan Jones” for flight company Ansett-ANA and was offered a solo record deal with EMI, where he worked with house producer David Mackay.
1967–79: Teen pop idol
Farnham’s first recording to sell well was a cover of the British novelty song “Sadie (The Cleaning Lady)”; Sambell didn’t like it because the lyrics kept repeating themselves. But David MacKay, an in-house producer at EMI, insisted, and the single came out in November 1967. Farnham wrote “In My Room,” which is on the B-side. Stan Rofe, a radio DJ in Melbourne, made a deal with Sambell to act like he didn’t like “Sadie” before playing it. Farnham became known in Australia because of this song. Rofe kept up the trick on the TV show Uptight, and viewers asked for the song to be played. [19] It was the top single in Australia in January 1968, and it stayed there for 6 weeks. “Sadie” was the best-selling single by an Australian artist in the 2000s, selling 180,000 copies in Australia. It was also the best-selling single in Australia at the time. Rofe wrote for Go-Set, a pop magazine for teens. Ian “Molly” Meldrum, who also wrote for the magazine, praised Farnham’s work. Go-Set held a poll to find the “King of Pop,” and Normie Rowe was the first winner from 1967 to 1968. “Underneath the Arches” and “I Don’t Want to Love You” were the top-charting singles for Farnham in 1968.
Farnham’s album Everybody Oughta Sing a Song came out in 1969. It got as high as No. 12 on the Australian albums charts. His next single was a cover of “One” by Harry Nilsson. It reached number 4 on the charts. When TV Week held the “King of Pop” awards, readers sent in coupons with their votes. John Farnham won the most popular male award and was named “King of Pop” five times in a row from 1969 to 1973. He did a cover of “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head,” which was a hit for B.J. Thomas. It became his second No. 1 hit in December 1969 and stayed there for seven weeks, until January 1970.
The next album by Farnham, Looking Through a Tear, came out in July 1970 and reached number 11 on the charts. “Comic Conversations,” his October single, reached #10 at its highest point. In 1971, Farnham worked with Allison Durbin, who had won the “King of Pop” award for “Most Popular Female Performer” from 1969 to 1971. In September, they put out an album called Together and a single called “Baby, Without You.” Both songs reached their highest positions on their charts in November. Farnham sang, but he also did musicals on stage, starting with Dick Whittington and His Cat in 1971, and he was either a guest performer or a host on TV variety shows.
In 1972, when Farnham was 22, he was named “King of Moomba.” A Melbourne newspaper called him a “likeable English immigrant” who is “King of Pop, King of Kids, and today Johnny Farnham was King of Moomba.” In 1972, Farnham had a top 5 national hit with a cover of the title track from David Cassidy’s international hit album Rock Me Baby. [needs citation]
In 1971, Farnham did another musical called Charlie Girl
One of the dancers was Jillian Billman, and on April 18, 1973, Farnham married her. Meldrum told Go-Set about their plans to get married, but Sambell denied the rumors, and even though he was best man at the wedding, he didn’t want Billman to marry Farnham. The well-groomed pop star made a few more albums and singles, but by the middle of the 1970s, he was making less music and doing more stage musicals and TV. Farnham and Colleen Hewett, who was “Queen of Pop” from 1972 to 1974, worked together on the 1973–74 stage musical Pippin and its 1974 show album. [32] In 1974, Farnham and Hewett were the hosts of a children’s TV show called “It’s Magic” on Channel Ten. People who watched Countdown got to know him when he hosted the show’s first color broadcast in early 1975 and introduced Skyhooks’ performance of “Horror Movie.” Relations with Sambell got bad, and in January 1976, they said they were breaking up. Farnham’s first manager was Kenn Brodziak, who made the movie Pippin. From 1976 to 1978, he worked with Danny Finley, who was then Hewett’s husband.
Farnham played the title character on the situation comedy show Bobby Dazzler from 1977 to 1978. He also narrated documentaries like Survival with Johnny Farnham. Farnham was having trouble paying his bills because he hadn’t paid his taxes and his restaurant business with Hewett and Finley had failed. Farnham could only sing in cabarets and musicals on stage at this point. In 1979, he started going by the name John Farnham on stage.
1980–85: Little River Band era
When both of their bands were managed by Sambell in the 1960s, Farnham met Glenn Wheatley, who played bass for the rock band The Masters Apprentices.
[15] Little River Band (LRB) was now being run by Wheatley. In 1980, Farnham signed with Wheatley. [15] They decided that his comeback single would be a remake of “Help!” by The Beatles. It was produced by LRB’s Graeham Goble and reached #8. Farnham was using a more adult contemporary pop style, and the album that went with it, Uncovered, which was also made by Goble, reached its highest position at #20. “Jillie’s Song,” another song that Farnham wrote with Goble, was on the flip side of “Help.”
Farnham’s studio band was made up of guitarist Tommy Emmanuel (from the Southern Star Band), keyboardist Mal Logan (from the Renée Geyer Band, LRB), drummer Derek Pellicci (from LRB), and bassist Barry Sullivan (ex-Chain). They became his tour band until Logan and Pellicci had to go back to their LRB duties and were replaced by Sam McNally and David Jones, respectively. In 1980, Farnham also starred in a TV show called Farnham and Byrne with Debra Byrne, who had been on Young Talent Time and was known as the “Queen of Pop.” In 1981, he put out three more solo singles, but none of them made it into the top 50.
After Glenn Shorrock left Little River Band in February 1982, Goble and Wheatley suggested that they hire John Farnham as their lead singer. Farnham didn’t want to join LRB at first, but Wheatley was able to convince him that Shorrock liked the replacement. This was another step away from cabaret and toward rock music for Farnham.
Little River Band made three studio albums with Farnham. They did okay, but not well enough to pay back the money the record company gave them in advance. The songs on Farnham’s first studio album, The Net, were already written, so all he had to do was record his lead vocals. Greatest Hits (1982), The Net (1983), and Playing to Win (1984) were albums with Farnham’s singing that did well on the Billboard Pop Albums chart/Billboard 200 in the US. The singles “The Other Guy,” “We Two,” “You’re Driving Me Out of My Mind,” and “Playing to Win” were all on the charts at the same time. Farnham’s biggest hits in Australia with LRB were the No. 7 single “Down on the Border” from 1982 and the No. 11 album “The Net” from 1983.
During this time, Farnham started doing vocal tracks for movies like Savage Streets (1984), The Slugger’s Wife (1985), and Fletch (1985). He kept doing this with Rad (1986) and Voyage of the Rock Aliens (1987). (1987). Farnham helped write “Justice for One” for the Savage Streets album, and it was released as a solo single.
Little River Band did a concert in Melbourne that was recorded and then shown on HBO in the United States. The concert video was only an hour long, and it featured songs from The Net as well as reworked versions of Little River Band classics like “Cool Change” and “Reminiscing.” During the “Australian-themed” beginning of the show, “Please Don’t Ask Me,” which was written by Goble and was a non-top 50 single for Farnham almost three years ago, was played. Even though reviews and reactions in Australia and the US were good, this performance has not yet been put on VHS or DVD.
Farnham told Channel Seven, “It would be better for me to leave than to put myself under pressure that I’ve made.” Through this, it became clear to the band that Farnham was planning to leave. The lead single from Playing to Win, “Playing to Win,” which everyone thought would be the band’s way back to success, then had authorship disputes. Farnham says that: