1/5
March 14 (UPI) — Dionne Warwick is sharing advice from her late mentor and fellow singer Frank Sinatra. The 81-year-old singer shared the best advice she received from Sinatra, who died at age 82 in 1998, during Sunday’s episode of Watch What Happens Live.
“He and everyone else that mentored me — ‘Be who you are. You can’t be anyone other than that,'” Warwick said.
Warwick previously named Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne and Sammy Davis Jr. as her mentors in an interview with the Chicago Tribune.
“They all embraced me and decided I was their baby. That gave me a sense of self of who I was and who I wanted to be. I wanted to emulate them,” she said.
On WWHL, Warwick also recalled meeting singer Nina Simone at the Apollo Theater in New York.
“It was the wildest thing,” she recalled. “It was at the Apollo Theater, and it’s my first time performing there and I was terrified.”
Warwick said Simone encouraged her as she was standing at the curtain waiting to go on stage.
“She said, ‘Well, listen. I want you to do this — when you go out on that stage, I want you to make it so hot that anybody that follows you has to tip toe,'” she recalled.
Warwick is a six-time Grammy winner who has sold more than 100 million records worldwide. She is known for such singles as “Walk on By,” “I Say a Little Prayer” and “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again.”
