Dame Cleo Laine | |
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 Laine in 1997 | |
| Background information | |
| Birth name | Clementine Dinah Hitching |
| Born | 28 October 1927 Southall, Middlesex, England |
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| Years active | 1950s–2018 |
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Dame Cleo Laine, Lady Dankworth DBE (born Clementine Dinah Hitching; 28 October 1927) is an English singer and actress known for her scat singing. [1] She is the widow of jazz composer and musician Sir John Dankworth and the mother of bassist Alec Dankworth and singer Jacqui Dankworth.
Laine was born Clementine Dinah Hitching on 28 October 1927, in Southall, Middlesex (now London), [2] [3] [4] to Alexander Sylvan Campbell, a Jamaican [5] who worked as a building labourer [6] and regularly busked, [7] and Minnie Bullock, an English farmer's daughter from Swindon, Wiltshire, whose maiden name was reportedly Hitching. [5]
The family moved constantly, but most of Laine's childhood was spent in Southall. It was not until 1953, when she was 26 and applying for a passport for a forthcoming tour of Germany, that Laine found out her real birth name, owing to her parents not being married at the time and her mother registering her under her own name (Hitching). [5]
Laine attended the Board School on Featherstone Road, Southall (later known as Featherstone Primary School), and was sent by her mother for singing and dancing lessons at an early age. She went on to attend Mellow Lane Senior School in Hayes [6] before going to work as an apprentice hairdresser, a hat-trimmer, a librarian, and in a pawnbroker's shop. [5]
Laine auditioned successfully at the age of 24 for John Dankworth's small group, the Johnny Dankworth Seven. Laine later played with his big bands, Johnny Dankworth & His Orchestra as well as Johnny Dankworth & His New Radio Orchestra, with which she performed until 1958. Dankworth and Laine married that year. [6] She played the lead in Barry Reckord's Flesh to a Tiger at London's Royal Court Theatre, home of the new wave of playwrights of the 1950s such as John Osborne and Harold Pinter. The same year, she played the title role in The Barren One, Sylvia Wynter's adaptation of Federico García Lorca's Yerma. This led to other stage performances, such as the musical Valmouth in 1959, the play A Time to Laugh (with Robert Morley and Ruth Gordon) in 1962, Boots With Strawberry Jam (with John Neville) in 1968, and eventually to her role as Julie in Wendy Toye's production of Show Boat at the Adelphi Theatre in London in 1971. [8] Show Boat had its longest run to date in that London season with 910 performances staged. [9]
During this period, she had two major recording successes. "You'll Answer to Me" reached the British Top 10 while Laine was "prima donna" in the 1961 Edinburgh Festival production of Kurt Weill's opera/ballet The Seven Deadly Sins , directed and choreographed by Kenneth MacMillan. In 1964, her Shakespeare and All that Jazz album with Dankworth was well received. Dankworth and Laine founded the Stables theatre in 1970, in what was the old stables block in the grounds of their home. [10] It eventually hosted over 350 concerts per year. [11]
Laine's international activities began in 1972, with a successful first tour of Australia, where she released six top-100 albums throughout the 1970s. [12] Shortly afterwards, her career in the United States was launched with a concert at New York's Lincoln Center, followed in 1973 by the first of many Carnegie Hall appearances. Coast-to-coast tours of the US and Canada soon followed, and with them a succession of record albums and television appearances, including The Muppet Show in 1977. [13] This led, after several nominations, to her first Grammy award, in recognition of the live recording of her 1983 Carnegie concert. She kept touring into the 21st century, including in Australia in 2005. [14] She performed live in the UK as late as 2018. [1]
She has collaborated with James Galway, Nigel Kennedy, Julian Lloyd Webber and John Williams. Other important recordings during that time were duet albums with Ray Charles ( Porgy and Bess ) as well as Arnold Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire , for which she received a Grammy Award nomination. [15]
Laine's relationship with the musical theatre started in Britain and continued in the United States with starring performances in Sondheim's A Little Night Music and Franz Lehár's The Merry Widow (Michigan Opera). In 1980 she starred in Colette, a musical by Dankworth. The show began at the Stables theatre, Wavendon, in 1979 and transferred to the Comedy Theatre, London, in September 1980. In 1985 she originated the role of Princess Puffer in the Broadway musical The Mystery of Edwin Drood , for which she received a Tony nomination. In 1989, she received the Los Angeles critics' acclaim for her portrayal of the Witch in Sondheim's Into the Woods . [16] In May 1992, Laine appeared with Frank Sinatra for a week of concerts at the Royal Albert Hall in London. [17]
Derek Jewel of the Sunday Times dubbed her "quite simply the best singer in the world." [18]
In 1946, Laine married George Langridge, a roof tiler, with whom she had a son, Stuart. The couple divorced in 1957. [19] [20]
In 1958, she married John Dankworth. [6] They were married until his death in 2010. On that day, Laine performed at a concert at The Stables to mark the venue's 40th anniversary. She then announced Dankworth's death at the end of the show. [1]
As of 2018 [update] , Laine resides in Wavendon, Buckinghamshire. [1]
Bernadette Peters is an American actress and singer. Over a career spanning more than six decades, she has starred in musical theatre, television and film, performed in solo concerts and released recordings. She is a critically acclaimed Broadway performer, having received seven nominations for Tony Awards, winning two, and nine Drama Desk Award nominations, winning three. Four of the Broadway cast albums on which she has starred have won Grammy Awards.
Dreimal sieben Gedichte aus Albert Girauds "Pierrot lunaire", commonly known simply as Pierrot lunaire, Op. 21, is a melodrama by Arnold Schoenberg. It is a setting of 21 selected poems from Albert Giraud's cycle of the same name as translated into German by Otto Erich Hartleben. The work is written for reciter who delivers the poems in the Sprechstimme style accompanied by a small instrumental ensemble. Schoenberg had previously used a combination of spoken text with instrumental accompaniment, called "melodrama", in the summer-wind narrative of the Gurre-Lieder, which was a fashionable musical style popular at the end of the nineteenth century. Though the music is atonal, it does not employ Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, which he did not use until 1921.
Wavendon is a village and civil parish in the south east of the Milton Keynes urban area, in Buckinghamshire, England.
Barbara Cook was an American actress and singer who first came to prominence in the 1950s as the lead in the original Broadway musicals Plain and Fancy (1955), Candide (1956) and The Music Man (1957) among others, winning a Tony Award for the last. She continued performing mostly in theatre until the mid-1970s, when she began a second career as a cabaret and concert singer. She also made numerous recordings.
Sir John Phillip William Dankworth, CBE, also known as Johnny Dankworth, was an English jazz composer, saxophonist, clarinettist and writer of film scores. With his wife, jazz singer Dame Cleo Laine, he was a music educator and also her music director.
Allan Anthony Ganley was an English jazz drummer and arranger.
Alexander William Tamba Dankworth is an English jazz bassist and composer.
Chris Karan is a Britain-based Australian jazz drummer and percussionist of Greek descent.
Side by Side by Sondheim is a musical revue featuring the songs of composer Stephen Sondheim. Its title is derived from the song "Side by Side by Side" from Company.
Joanna Eden is an English jazz singer, songwriter and pianist.
Kenneth Cloudsley Clare was a British jazz drummer.
The Stables is a music venue situated in Wavendon, a small village in south-east Milton Keynes. The Stables hosts over 400 concerts and around 250 education events a year including the National Youth Music Camps which take place over the summer.
Malcolm Edmonstone is a British jazz pianist and pop arranger. He studied at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where he became Head of Jazz. Edmonstone provided orchestral arrangements for Gary Barlow’s 2020 album Music Played by Humans. He has conducted and arranged for the BBC Concert Orchestra numerous times for BBC Radio 2, featuring vocalists Rick Astley, Katie Melua, Mark King, Ruby Turner, Tommy Blaize, Tony Momrelle and Heather Small. In 2020 he was Music Director at the National Theatre for Tony Kushner’s adaptation of The Visit (play). In 2016 he made his BBC Proms debut, arranging and conducting for Iain Ballamy and Liane Carroll.
Jacqueline Caryl Dankworth is a British jazz singer. She is the daughter of jazz singer Cleo Laine and musician John Dankworth.
Marilyn Maye McLaughlin is an American singer, musical theater actress and masterclass educator. With a career spanning eight decades, Maye has performed music in the styles of cabaret, jazz and pop music. She has received one nomination from the Grammy Awards and had commercial success as a recording artist.
Cleo at Carnegie: The 10th Anniversary Concert is a live album by Cleo Laine, recorded at Carnegie Hall and released in April 1983 through RCA Records. The album earned Laine a Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal Performance, Female. John Dankworth was the arranger.
Frank Holder was a Guyanese jazz singer and percussionist. He was a member of bands led by Jiver Hutchinson, Johnny Dankworth and Joe Harriott.
The National Jazz Archive is a collection of materials pertaining to jazz and blues that is kept at the Loughton Library in Essex, England. The archive was founded by British trumpeter Digby Fairweather in 1998 and contains visual and print materials from the 1920s to the present.
Avril Margaret Dankworth was an English music educator who established the week-long summer Avril Dankworth Children's Music Camps for children aged between 7 and 17 in Wavendon, near Milton Keynes, in mid-1970. She also sang, taught music, authored multiple books and helped introduce the idiom in school music curriculum.
Bernadette Peters is an American actress, singer, and children's book author.
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