Cleo Laine(1927-2025)

As a child, Cleo Laine was inspired by cinema and by musicals, by Deanna Durbin and Judy Garland. She first performed in public at the age of twelve, playing a street urchin in the motion picture The Thief of Bagdad (1940). The film also featured her older sister, Sylvia Laine and younger brother, Alexander Laine. Cleo was born Clementine Dinah Bullock to Jamaican father Alexander Sylvan Campbell, a building labourer and busker, and English mother Minnie Bullock (née Hitching), who ran boarding houses. Though her (unmarried) parents sent her to attend singing and dancing lessons early on, Cleo's first job at fourteen was as an apprentice hairdresser. After that, she worked briefly in millinery, as a library clerk and in a pawnbroker's establishment. While still in her teens, Cleo married roof tiler George Langridge. The union ended in divorce eleven years later, in 1957.

At age 24, by now strongly influenced by the great jazz vocalists Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and Lena Horne, Laine auditioned successfully for the Johnny Dankworth Seven jazz ensemble. As Dankworth's lead singer, she went on to perform with his big bands: "I was a contralto with a very limited range. John edged me up by doing arrangements of songs in keys I'd never tried, and he gave me light and shade, and polished my technique endlessly. And the more I listened to jazz, the more I realised that one had to have the range of all the instruments possible. Whenever I listened to Annie Ross or Jimi Hendrix, I vowed to emulate them." In addition to her wide vocal range, Laine also took her cue from Ella Fitzgerald by becoming Britain's foremost scat singer.

The enduring Laine-Dankworth collaboration led to an equally enduring marriage, which began in 1958 and ended with the bandleader's death in 2010. In 1959, Laine added another feather to her cap by making her stage debut at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, in the musical Valmouth. Her most famous, show-stopping performance was as Julie La Verne in Wendy Toye's long-running production of Showboat, at London's Adelphi Theatre (July 1971-September 1973). Laine further headlined in musical theatre, both in Britain and the U.S., notably in Sondheim's A Little Night Music and Into the Woods and on Broadway (1985-87) in the musical adaptation (by Rupert Holmes) of the unfinished Dickens novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

During the sixties and seventies, Laine expanded her repertoire from classic jazz standards (eg. Mood Indigo, St Louis Blues, Ridin' High, I Got Rhythm, April In Paris, I Got It Bad And That Ain't Good, Misty) to poetic word songs by Shakespeare (backed by Dankworth and a small ensemble) and interpretations of works by Weill (The Seven Deadly Sins) and Schoenberg (Pierrot Lunaire). She enjoyed many successful collaborations and duet albums with jazz legends like Dudley Moore, Count Basie, Ted Heath, Mel Tormé, Dizzy Gillespie and Ray Charles (Porgy and Bess, 1976).

Adding to 75 record albums and a string of sold-out international tours were frequent appearances in TV specials and guest spots on shows hosted by David Frost, Johnny Carson, Merv Griffin, Mike Douglas, and others. Laine also acted and/or sang in several motion pictures, most recently a telemovie, The Last of the Blonde Bombshells (2000). The plot revolved around a recently widowed former saxophonist (Judi Dench) attempting to reassemble the ageing members of her former 1940's swing band. Laine played the orchestra's vocalist, while other alumni were portrayed by Joan Sims (in her final screen role), Olympia Dukakis, Billie Whitelaw, Leslie Caron and June Whitfield.

In 1986, Laine won a Grammy Award for Best Female Jazz Vocal Performance for her live album Cleo at Carnegie: The 10th Anniversary Concert. For her services to music, she received an OBE in the 1979 Queen's Birthday Honours List and was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1997. In addition to several honorary doctorates, she has a street in Adelaide CBD, South Australia, named after her. Laine's autobiography, 'Cleo', was published by Simon & Schuster in 1994. A second book, 'You Can Sing If You Want To', was released in 1997.