Cleo Laine, Grammy-winning jazz singer and actor, dies at 97

Cleo Laine performs live on stage with jazz musician John Dankworth in London in 1976. Photo / David Redfern, Redferns via Getty Images

Cleo Laine, an English singer who moved easily among musical genres with a dazzling vocal range of almost five octaves and who nurtured a dual career as an actor, performing in musicals and dramatic roles during a career of more than six decades, died July 24 at her home in Wavendon, England. She was 97.

Her death was announced in a statement from Monica Ferguson, the chief executive and artistic director of the Stables, a British arts centre founded by Laine and her husband, John Dankworth. The cause was not disclosed.

Laine began performing in London jazz clubs in the early 1950s, working alongside Dankworth, a saxophonist. After they married, they formed Britain’s royal couple of jazz, winning acclaim for performances that combined bebop with baroque music and the blues.

Nothing if not eclectic, Laine remains the only female singer to be nominated for Grammy Awards in the pop, classical and jazz categories, which she accomplished in successive years in the 1970s. She was the first – and still the only – British singer to receive a Grammy for best jazz vocal performance, when she won for her 1983 album Cleo at Carnegie: The 10th Anniversary Concert.

Her repertoire encompassed the saucy lyrics of British playwright and composer Noël Coward, the poetry of John Donne and T.S. Eliot, standards by Duke Ellington and George Gershwin, and even Shakespeare’s sonnets, which were worked into jazz compositions by Dankworth. A concert by Laine was likely to have a 19th-century German art song by Robert Schumann followed by a tune by Stephen Sondheim or Fats Waller.

Laine, who rarely appeared without Dankworth at her side as her musical director, made dozens of recordings, including albums with classical guitarist John Williams and flutist James Galway. She recorded songs from Porgy and Bess with Ray Charles.

Ray Charles and Cleo Laine recording Porgy and Bess, the Gershwin folk opera in a studio at RCA records in Los Angeles, California, in July 1976. Photo / Afro American Newspapers, Gado, Getty Images

Her parallel career as a theatre actor informed the dramatic flair she brought to her singing.

“I’m a cabaret singer wherever I am,” she once told the Washington Post. “I think it’s a part of me that the words are very important, much more so than improvisation. I think that the drama of a song is a lot more important than oobly-shoobling all over the place.”

In 1961, she had a song in the top five on the British pop chart (You’ll Answer to Me), appeared as a nightclub singer in the film The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone and received glowing reviews for her performance at an Edinburgh arts festival, when she filled in at the last minute for Lotte Lenya in The Seven Deadly Sins, a theatrical piece with music and dance by Lenya’s husband, Kurt Weill.

The following year, Laine – who identified herself as Black and biracial – appeared in two plays on the London stage, one of which was Caryl Brahms and Ned Sherrin’s Cindy-Ella, or I Gotta Shoe, an all-Black musical based on the Cinderella story.

She had dramatic roles in other British productions, including a modern adaptation of Euripides’ The Trojan Women, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the title role in a 1970 staging of Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler.

Laine had a showstopping role in a long-running 1971-72 London revival of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s Show Boat, playing Julie, a mixed-race singer whose story ends in tragedy. Her songs, including Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man and Bill, invariably brought the audience to its feet.

The cast of the musical production Cindy-Ella, or I Gotta Shoe during a performance: actor and singer Elisabeth Welch (left), jazz singer Cleo Laine, and actors Cy Grant and George Brown, at the Garrick Theatre, London, in December 1962. Photo / Bryan Wharton, Daily Express, Hulton Archive, Getty Images

In 1972, after Laine made her New York debut at Alice Tully Hall, New York Times jazz critic John S. Wilson called her one of Britain’s “national treasures… with a remarkable voice that ranges from an exotically dark, breathy quality to high-note-topping exclamation”.

Despite her undeniable vocal dexterity, other reviewers were unmoved by the commanding theatricality she brought to the concert stage.

“She has a frighteningly accurate ear and a teasingly infallible sense of rhythm,” Times music critic John Rockwell wrote in 1974 of Laine’s performance at New York’s Carnegie Hall. “But for this listener, admiration stops a good deal short of real affection. Miss Laine strikes me as a calculating singer, one whose highly perfected artifice continually blocks communicative feeling. To me, she has all the personality of a carp. But then, obviously, I’m just a cold fish.”

Nonetheless, Laine maintained a large and loyal following for both her singing and her theatrical work. Dankworth wrote a musical play for her, based on the life of the French writer Colette, that premiered in 1979 and later moved to London’s West End.

In 1985, Laine developed the role of Princess Puffer in the original Broadway production of The Mystery of Edwin Drood (later called Drood), based on an unfinished novel by Charles Dickens, and earned a Tony Award nomination for best actress in a musical.

In 2000, she played a singer in The Last of the Blonde Bombshells, a joint US-British TV movie about a latter-day reunion of an all-female band from World War II, also starring Judi Dench, Olympia Dukakis and Ian Holm.

Cleo Laine and her second husband John Dankworth. Photo / Mick Hutson, Redferns via Getty Images

“Whatever I’m doing at the time is my favourite thing,” Laine told the Post. “A lot of people would say I’m too eclectic, diversifying far too much, but I think that because of that I’ve worked longer and had a much more interesting life.”

Clementina Dinah Campbell was born October 28, 1927, in the Southall district of London. She had a Black Jamaican father and a White English mother who were not married to each other when their daughter was born.

In a 1994 autobiography, Laine called her mother “a bigamist” who had not obtained a divorce before marrying Laine’s father. The family moved frequently, and her parents held a variety of jobs, including running a cafe and boardinghouse. Her father also worked in construction and “would sing at the drop of a hat”, Laine told the Post.

“He was a busker, singing on street corners in the Depression,” she said. “It was a matter of need, dire need, in those days. Being Black, it was difficult for him to get work, so he busked. I wasn’t really aware of this until much later, when I realised that he used to bring a lot of pennies home and count them.”

Young Clementina was strongly influenced by her father’s interest in jazz and was encouraged by her mother to study music and acting. She left school at 14 and became an apprentice hairdresser, always hoping to break into show business. “I would sit in the cinema,” she later told Britain’s Daily Telegraph newspaper, “watching Lena Horne and Judy Garland and think: ‘I want that for me’.”

At 19, she married George Langridge, a roofer, and had a son. Five years later, in 1951, Laine had a tryout with Dankworth, then emerging as one of England’s leading jazz musicians. “I think she’s got something, don’t you?” he told his bandmates after the audition.

Dame Cleo Laine attends the Jazz FM Awards 2018 at Shoreditch Town Hall in London, England. Photo / David M. Benett, Getty Images

“Something?” a trumpeter answered. “I think she’s got everything.”

Her name at the time was Clementina – or Clem – Campbell Langridge. After some brainstorming, the band members decided to call her Cleo Laine. “They decided my real name was too long and sounded like a cowboy,” she told the Chicago Sun-Times.

Her sister raised her son while Laine devoted herself to her career. She impressed Dankworth and his band not just with her voice but with her ability to match them, glass for glass, in drinking ale during their tours of British nightclubs. By the mid-1950s, Laine was anointed Britain’s top jazz singer by critics and music magazines.

She divorced her first husband, from whom she had grown apart, and she married Dankworth in 1958. They had two children, who were raised by nannies and attended boarding schools while their parents were on tour.

They lived about 80km from London in the village of Wavendon, where they established a theatre and an educational foundation. In the “show must go on” tradition, Laine gave a performance at Wavendon on February 6, 2010. Only at the end did she announce that Dankworth had died earlier that day.

Dankworth was presented with a fellowship of the Royal Academy in 1973 and the following year appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. He was knighted in 2006, the first British jazz musician to receive this honour.

Survivors include a son from her first marriage, Stuart Langridge; two children from her second marriage, singer Jacqui Dankworth and jazz bassist and composer Alec Dankworth; and several grandchildren.

Laine wrote two volumes of memoirs and received the title of Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1997. Her voice remained supple and precise well into her 80s.

In 1983, she told the Post how she sought to connect with her listeners: “I like to imagine when I’m singing that it’s not thousands of people but one person, and a love affair can be created that way. I ignore my husband in the background: this is a love affair going on.”

Matt Schudel has been an obituary writer at The Washington Post since 2004.