Jane Morgan, a silky-smooth chanteuse who wowed Parisian nightclub goers with her renditions of American standards in the 1940s and then returned to her native United States in the 1950s to do the same for American audiences with a French-inflected songbook, died on Monday at her home in Naples, Fla. She was 101.
Her family announced the death in a statement.
Ms. Morgan was a ubiquitous presence in the early days of television variety shows; fluent in French, she turned heads with her bilingual renditions of songs like “Le Jour où la Pluie Viendra” (“The Day the Rains Came”).
She did the same with a schedule of near-constant performing in upscale hot spots across the country, like the Cocoanut Grove in Los Angeles and the Persian Room in New York, during the golden age of supper-club entertainment in the 1950s and ’60s.
She arrived in Paris in 1948, having dropped out of Juilliard after the French nightclub impresario Bernard Hilda offered her a chance to sing at his venue on the Champs Élysées. She spent the next three years there, interspersed with stints in Monaco, Rome and other enclaves of the luxuriously urbane.
Her return to America in 1951 coincided with a booming nightlife culture in New York and other cities, where on any night a couple could find a darkened club with a good meal, a strong martini and a torch singer belting out tunes from the American songbook.
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