Cleo Laine, one of England’s most acclaimed jazz singers and an actress who had a memorable Broadway turn as the proprietor of a London opium den in “The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” died on Thursday at her home in Wavendon, England. She was 97.
Her death was confirmed by her daughter, Jacqui Dankworth.
Ms. Laine, who was known for a smoky voice that she could deploy over a four-octave range and for her skillful scat singing, recorded numerous albums across six decades. She won a Grammy Award in 1986 for best female jazz vocal performance for “Cleo at Carnegie: The 10th Anniversary Concert.” She and her husband, the saxophonist and bandleader John Dankworth, performed all over the world and in various settings ranging from intimate nightclubs to the London Palladium.
Ms. Laine’s interests were wide ranging. She had small roles in a handful of movies, in several of which she was credited simply as “Singer.” She performed in operas, worked pop songs into her act and was drawn to the theater, especially musical theater.
Her performance as Princess Puffer in “The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” based on an unfinished Charles Dickens novel and staged as a nightly murder mystery in which the audience votes on the culprit, earned her a Tony nomination in 1986 as well as a number of murder indictments.
She didn’t mind the criminal record she’d acquired onstage, but she joked in a 1985 interview with The New York Times that one thing about the role gave her pause. “It certainly can’t do my career any harm,” she said, “unless everybody says from now on, ‘Get Cleo Laine for the old hag. She’s very good as an old hag.’”
Cleo Laine was born Clementine Dinah Campbell on Oct. 28, 1927, in Southall, West London. Her father, Alec Campbell, was a Jamaican who settled in England after fighting in World War I. Her mother, Minnie Hitchings, was an Englishwoman who made sure that no one gave her daughter grief over her mixed heritage.
“If anyone insulted us, she would run at them with a broom,” Ms. Laine once told an interviewer.
She had a brief early marriage to George Langridge, with whom she had a son, Stuart, but in her 20s she started to think that the singing lessons she had taken as a child might be the underpinning for a career. In 1952 she auditioned to be a vocalist in Mr. Dankworth’s band and was hired. They married in 1958.
By the mid-1960s she had become one of the most celebrated jazz singers in England. So when she made her formal New York debut at Alice Tully Hall in September 1972 — having previously performed only informally with her husband’s band at Birdland in 1959 — the critic John S. Wilson wrote in The Times that the British had been “hoarding what must be one of their national treasures.”
Why did it take so long for the couple to try to conquer the United States? “We had waited for the Beatle hysteria to die down,” Ms. Laine told The Times in 1975.
Subsequent years found her playing New York outlets as varied as the Blue Note and Carnegie Hall. In these and other appearances, reviewers often praised her vocal range and interpretive ability as well as her adventurous spirit in song selection. But not everyone warmed to her style.
“Her renditions of popular and not-so-popular tunes are models of taste,” Robert Palmer wrote in The Times in a review of “Cleo on Broadway,” a six-night concert show she performed with Mr. Dankworth’s orchestra at the Minskoff Theater in 1977. “The problem is that one waits in vain for some visceral reaction to her singing, for an emotional punch, or at least a tap.”
She toured for many years and recorded album after album. Among the more noteworthy were “Cleo Sings Sondheim” (1988), which contained a particularly striking version of “Send In the Clowns,” and “Woman to Woman” (1989), which consisted entirely of songs written by women, including her own “Secret Feeling.”
Ms. Laine was an enthusiastic collaborator. She recorded albums with her fellow singers Mel Tormé and Ray Charles and the flutist James Galway, among others. In May 1985, she was among the guests at Symphony Hall in Boston singing with the Boston Pops in a celebration of that orchestra’s 100th birthday. She sang “The Way You Look Tonight” in a duet with Tony Bennett in 2011 at a concert at the London Palladium marking his 85th birthday. And she performed and recorded with her daughter, a jazz singer. She once even sang a ridiculous version of Irving Berlin’s “You’re Just in Love” with the “Muppet Show” character the Swedish Chef.
She and Mr. Dankworth also benefited generations of performers through the Stables, a performance space they created on the grounds of their home. Mr. Dankworth died in 2010, hours before a concert to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the founding of the Stables. The show went on, and so did Ms. Laine. Just before the finale, she told the crowd about his death.
In addition to her daughter, Ms. Laine is survived by her son Alec, a bassist; four grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren. Her son Stuart died in 2019.
In 1997, Ms. Laine was named Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, making her Dame Cleo. She continued performing well into her 80s and became known for her remarkable longevity.
“I am still singing and I’ve got work if I want it,” she said in The Guardian in 2011 at age 83, shortly after breaking her leg in a fall. As for her voice, she said, “I used to be famous for my four-octave range — I think I’ve lost one of them.”
Ash Wu contributed reporting.
Neil Genzlinger is a former writer for the Obituaries desk. Previously he was a television, film and theater critic.
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