Cilla Black had spoken of how she would die happy if she were to pass away before any illness could rob her of being able to enjoy life.
As the much-loved entertainer approached her 71st birthday last year, she said that 75 might be an OK age to die.
She told the Daily Mirror: “Seventy-five is a good age to go, I still think that way.
“I don’t want to linger. I don’t want to be a burden on anybody. I know 75 is only four years away but I take each day as I find it.”
She described some of the hassles of growing old, including damage to her hearing.
Black, a singing star in the 1960s who turned into a TV legend with warm-hearted shows such as Blind Date and Surprise! Surprise!, said: “The hearing is the bugbear. I now have an implant in my ear to help my hearing which I have to turn off at night. I’m talking in an echo chamber at the moment. I guess that’s just getting old – it’ll come to you, too ...”
She later told Radio Times that she had made the remark after watching her mother go downhill in her old age.
Black said: “I meant that I didn’t want to be like that, but I ain’t going nowhere. I just thank God when I wake up every day. I’m going to grow old disgracefully. It’s come full circle and is once more about me, me, me. I can do anything I want.”
Just last year, as an ITV drama starring actress Sheridan Smith put Black back in the limelight, Black revealed she had turned down an offer to become a talent show judge.
She told Radio Times: “Today I’d be first in the queue for The X Factor and there’s no doubt whatsoever that I’d win.
“I’ve been asked to be a judge but I couldn’t because I wouldn’t be able to tell the truth. The meanest I’d get is saying, ‘It hasn’t worked out for you this time, but go back and do your homework’.
“I couldn’t be like Simon Cowell. He’s not nasty, by the way, but tells it like it is.”
Black said she would have liked to be made a Dame, but that she had not notched up enough serious acting roles.
“You don’t become a Dame for doing what you enjoy, as I have, but if they want to give me one I wouldn’t turn it down,” she told the magazine.
Black told how “unknown to me, my agent turned down the part of Michael Caine’s girlfriend in The Italian Job because the fee wasn’t big enough. An iconic movie! I’d have done it for nothing.”
But she added: “Fame was my objective. I’d have been very happy on £25 a week. I didn’t know how much I earned, and when people said I was the highest-paid person on TV I wasn’t interested.”