Dusty Springfield, the smoky-voiced English torch singer whose interpretations of pop ballads were suffused with a heartbroken wistfulness, died on Tuesday at her home in Henley-on-Thames, near Oxford, west of London. She was 59. The cause was breast cancer, said her agent, Paul Fenn.

Ms. Springfield had one of the longest recording careers of any contemporary pop star, beginning in 1961 when she had the first of several hits with her folk-pop trio, the Springfields, and ending with her 1995 album, A Very Fine Love. She had most of her major hits in the 1960s when she was considered the British equivalent of Dionne Warwick; she recorded only intermittently after the early 1970s.

Her career was briefly rejuvenated in 1987 when the English duo the Pet Shop Boys (Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe), who were longtime fans, produced her Top Five hit, "What Have I Done To deserve This?" They also wrote and produced "Nothing Has Been Proved," the dense, swirling post-disco theme song that she sang on the soundtrack of the 1989 movie Scandal, about the Profumo sex scandal that had rocked the British government in the early 1960s.

Ms. Springfield became an international pop star in 1964 with "I Only Want To Be With You," a perky early-Beatles-style love song. Other major '60s hits included "Wishin' and Hopin'" (1964), and "The Look of Love" (1967), both written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, the team that supplied Ms. warwick with most of her early hits. Ms. Springfield's sultry rendition of "The Look of Love," from the soundtrack of Casino Royale, anticipated the heavy-breathing eroticism of Donna Summer a decade later.

Her best seller, "You Don't Have To Say You Love Me" (1966), was a big-belting tear-jerker that reached No. 4 on Billboard's singles chart and won her her first Grammy nomination. The country-soul ballad "Son-Of-A Preacher Man," her Top 10 hit from 1969, won her new respect and her second Grammy nomination after being prominently featured in the 1994 movie Pulp Fiction.

Dusty Springfield was born Mary Isabel Catherine Bernadette O'Brien on April 16, 1939, in Hampstead, London. While attending British convent schools, she discovered the music of Peggy Lee, whose intimate come-hither style was a major formative influence.

She got her professional start with an Andrews Sisters-style group called the Lana Sisters, but quit to form her own folk-pop group, the Springfields, with a friend, Tim Feild, and her brother, Dion O'Brien, now known as Tom Springfield, who is her only survivor. Promoted as a British answer to Peter, Paul and Mary, the group had a popular British television show and scored several English hits before breaking through in the United States with a Top 20 single, "Silver Threads and Golden Needles."

While visiting New York with the trio, Ms. Springfield recalled many years later, she heard the Exciters' brash, aggressive song "Tell Him" coming out of a Broadway record store and decided that she wanted to go pop.

"I was deeply influenced by black singers from the early 1960s," she said. "I liked everybody at Motown and most of the Stax artists. I really wanted to be Mavis Staples. what they shared in common was a kind of strength I didn't hear on English radio."

Ms. Springfield subsequently broke up her folk group and signed as a soloist with Philips Records. Her first single for the label, "I Only Want To Be With You," established her new direction. Ms. Springfield, with her teased beehive hairdo and eyes heavily blackened with mascara, was a 1960s pop fashion icon. From 1964 to 1967, when she left Philips, 11 of her singles hit the American pop charts.

"Son-Of-A Preacher Man," a song that Aretha Franklin had rejected but later recorded, became Ms. Springfield's first single for Atlantic Records and was featured on her Atlantic debut album, Dusty in Memphis, which is widely regarded as a pop masterpiece. To make the album, the Atlantic producing team of Jerry Wexler, Tom Dowd and Arif Mardin, who had brought Ms. Franklin to her peak of popularity, took Ms. Springfield to Memphis to record with a hot rhythm section.

The record, which included "The Windmills of Your Mind," an early collaboration of Michel Legrand with the lyricists Alan and Marilyn Bergman that was written for the movie The Thomas Crown Affair, was a perfect blend of warm country-soul and New York pop sophistication. For many singers, including Melissa Manchester, Linda Ronstadt and k.d. lang, it provided a blueprint for stylistically adventurous vocal showcases.

But Dusty in Memphis was not a big hit, reaching only No. 99 on Billboard's album chart. In 1970 Atlantic released her much-admired rhythm-and-blues-flavored album, A Brand New Me. Recorded in Philadelphia, the album fared no better than its forerunner.

Thereafter Ms. Springfield, who was awarded the Order of the British Empire in January, recorded only sporadically. Although her subsequent American albums - Cameo (1973, ABC-Dunhill), It Begins Again (1978, United Artists), Living Without Your Love (1979, United Artists), White Heat (1982, Casablanca) and A Very Fine Love (1995, Columbia) - found her voice as full and compelling as ever, the material and production rarely matched the singing.

After the 1970s she led a peripatetic existence, living sometimes in Los Angeles, at other times in the Netherlands and Britain. In 1997 Mercury Records released the 3-CD, 77-song Dusty Springfield Anthology. Last month Rhino Records released an expanded version of Dusty in Memphis.

Stephen Holden,
The New York Times,
March 4, 1999