Lady Cleo Laine, outstanding British jazz singer, who was given with a striking stage presence and voice span

Lady Cleo Laine, the singer and actress, who died at the age of 97, was not only the best jazz singer that Britain has ever produced, but also one of the most versatile and lasting musicians from every part of the world.

With a voice that could easily fly from a throat of a honey-to-high trill at the top of A, Cleo Laine sang professional from the mid-1950s to well into the 21st century and became the only artist who received grammy nominations in female jazz, in popular and classic categories. She also won jazz life prices, cut gold and platinum hits (feel the warm, sometimes when we touch) and performed over the decades in the theater and in numerous television programs.

Her marriage to John Dankworth, the jazz clarinetist, saxophonist, arranger and band manager, was one of the most constant and successful partnerships in music history. A Cleo Laine song was usually a John -Dankworth environment, daring and revitalized by wonderfully unexpected touch.

Thanksworthy began very early in her partnership with the development of unison passages for saxophone and wordless scat-sing, which used the wild gypsy strips in it. These became a trademark of many of their most memorable appearances.

Cleo Laine, cat like a cat with amazing green eyes, high cheekbones and a bouquet with crash hair, was always professional, with a striking stage presence and the timing and sensitivity of the actress towards the importance of words. The most remarkable thing about her was that she was largely autodidactic.

She was born on October 28, 1927 in Middlesex as Clementine Dinah Campbell in Southall in Middlesex. Her father, Alexander, was a Jamaican who had come to Great Britain to fight in the First World War and settle in Southall, where he became door-to-door seller and sometimes Busker.

Her mother Minnie was a West Country Girl and a free spirit. After the birth of Cleo, her parents went through a wedding ceremony, although her mother was already married. Together they led a café and then a pension for Irish workers.

Although her mother had a good voice, Cleo was mainly inherited from her father’s musical talent: she would remember that he had broken into a song when he walked along the street or was sitting on a bus. At the age of three, she began to perform at parties, work clubs and salmon meetings.

At school, she began to host the hopes of a show business career, inspired by the black singers, who saw in musicals like cabin in the sky and from the collection of jazz plates of her brother Alexander. At the age of 12 she played one of a lot of street coast in Alexander Kordas Dieb von Baghdad (1940).

She left the school at 14 and worked differently as an apprentice of a hairdresser, as a dedication, as a cobbler and as an assistant of a pawnberrie. At the same time, she spoke for jobs for singing, but without success. At 18, she married George Langridge, a local master builder with whom she had a son.

Finally her 32 Schilling was offered to do a one-night stand at the New Year’s party at the local Labor party. The bassists there suggested that she should audition for Johnny Dankworth Seven, one of the leading jazz groups in the country looking for a singer.

In February 1951 she appeared in the basement of the 51 club on the Charing Cross Road. Dankworth did not take much on her until she opened her mouth to sing; She chose you and paper moon.

“The voice just stood out, it seemed through,” Dankworth recalled. “I said,” You should better let yourself be heard from the rest of the band. “She sang in the club that evening and I asked the trumpeter:” Do you think she has something? “He said:” I think she has everything. “”

It was the band that decided to pull suggestions out of a hat that she should change her name in Cleo Laine (Cleo like in Cleopatra, Laine as in Frankie). Next year she became second place in the Melody Maker of the Year category in the Melody Maker category. She won the survey in 1956 and 1957.

Cleo fell in love with Daankworth and let her husband and son live alone in an apartment in the Kilburn High Road, although it took some time until she certainly knew that her feelings were returned. They finally got married in 1958. Thanksworthy lived at that time, but did not invite his mother to the wedding because she knew that she disapproved of his connection with a divorced woman who had a son and came from a marriage with a mixed race.

In fact, Cleo Laine was probably one of the few women who are exciting and unconventional enough to prevent thanksworthy, and they behaved more like young lovers than a married couple during their years together.

In the meantime, she made recordings alone and with Dankworth. The Gramophone Magazine, which rates two of her first albums, called her the tops and cleos choice.

In tandem with her singing, Cleo Laine tried to develop a career as an actress, with less luck. Her opportunity came in 1958 when Tony Richardson looked for a black actress to play Della, the leading role in Barry Recordd’s meat to a tiger. Richardson was not aware of her singing career, but saw her “raw strength in connection with an enormous stage presence”. Their performance was referred to as a triumph.

She gave her west end debut as a masseuse in Sandy Wilson’s musical adaptation of the Ronald Fairbank -Romans Valmouth (Saville, 1959). In 1961, when Lotte Lenya got sick, she entered to take over her role in Kurt Weill’s seven fatal sins at the Edinburgh Festival and to reproduce her in Sadler’s Wells. A few years later, she performed in a London production by Weill’s Mahagonny.

In 1962 she appeared over the Piccadilly Theater as Laura Leeds with Robert Morley in Robert Crean’s A Time to laugh and played several roles in I Gutta Shou or Cindy-Sella, Caryl Brahms and Ned Sherrin Black Musical version of Cinderella in Garrick. In 1964 she told the first British performance of Francis Poulencs The Story of Babar, the little elephant with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and 1967 facade by Edith Sith and William Walton.

In 1966 she returned to the Edinburgh Festival and played Andromache in the Trojan women and took on the double role of Hippolyta and Titania in Frank Dunlop’s production of a midsummer night dream next year, which went over to the Saville Theater in the west end. In 1971 she began a record run of 910 performances in Jerome Kern showboat in Adelphi, with her tender reproduction of Bill stopped the show at every performance.

She had her first film role as a singer in Tennessee Williams’ The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone (1961), and her voice was more to be heard on the soundtracks of several, including The Criminal (1960) and The Diener (1964). Her last film appearance took place in the last blonde bomb bowls (2000), in which lady Judi Dench played a former saxophonist in a war swing band, who summarizes the group’s remaining girls 50 years later for a last meeting. Cleo Laine was the singer. In addition, she was regularly in television programs in the early 1960s, including the week it was.

After Cleo Laine had established herself as a jazz singer with Dankworth’s band in the 1950s, she began to expand her musical horizon, explored jazz flexions of non-jazz music and spread out the “Seven” to become a regular big band. They broke into a new audience with thank-you-over “Shakespeare sonnette-shakespeare and all the jazz that won numerous awards.

Then she sang Schoenberg’s pierrot Lunaire and let songs by Richard Rodney Bennett wrote for her. At the 1966 St. Pancras Festival, she even sang songs by Schumann and Wagner, although on the whole she kept the classic opera and song repertoire away and recognized that the mastery of the genre required formal training.

When Cleo Laine celebrated her New York debut in Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center, the hall was only half full. But the reviewers were enthusiastic: “The British, who have dropped one rock group after another in the United States for years, have now heard what one of their national treasures must be,” wrote the man from the New York Times. The following year, her debut in Carnegie Hall was a sold out time when critic described her as “one of the two most important contributions from England to this indigenous American art form, jazz, the other gin”.

Then she made appearances or collaboration with Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra, Ellington Orchestra, Bill Cosby, Steven Sondheim and Chick Corea. In 1985 she played Princess Puffer in the Broadway Musical version of Dickens’ The Mystery of Edwin Drood, a show that won four Tony Awards, including the best musical. Her live album Cleo near Carnegie: The 10th anniversary concert brought in a Grammy in 1986.

You and thanks spent a large part of your time on tour and although you had a neo-Gothic rectory in Buckinghamshire and a house in California, the house was mainly on the road. The couple became prominent ambassadors of jazz and in 1969 founded the charity organization All Music Plan, which devoted themselves to overcoming the barriers between musical forms in the stables in their house in Wavendon, Buckinghamshire. In the mid-nineties, the stables were converted with the help of a lottery scholarship to become a 400-seater hall.

In the nineties, Cleo Laine was a member of the National Lottery Advisory Board of the Arts Council and urged Touring -Jazz band’s claims. Her autobiography Cleo was released in 1994. In 1996 she and her husband celebrated their 70th birthdays with a prom in Royal Albert Hall, who was sold out in advance and was a triumph as always.

Cleo Laine was named over 1979 and 1997.

Dankworth was knighted in 2006 and died in 2010; Cleo Laine announced his death during a concert. She is survived by her daughter Jacqui, a singer, and the son Alec, a bass player who played with Dave Brubeck and his father’s band. Her son from her first marriage, Stuart, died in 2019.

Dame Cleo Laine, born on October 28, 1927, died on July 24, 2025