Dame Cleo Laine
DBE |
Laine in 2007
|
| Background information |
| Birth name |
Clementine Dinah Bullock |
| Born |
(1927-10-28) 28 October 1927 (age 89)
Uxbridge, Middlesex, England |
| Genres |
Jazz, pop |
| Occupation(s) |
Actress, singer |
| Years active |
1950–present |
Dame Cleo Laine, Lady Dankworth, DBE (born 28 October 1927) is an English jazz and pop singer and an actress, known for her scat singing and for her vocal range. Though her natural range is that of a contralto, she is able to produce a "G above high C", giving her an overall compass of well over three octaves.
Laine is the only female performer to have received Grammy nominations in the jazz, popular and classical music categories. She is the widow of jazz composer Sir John Dankworth.
Laine was born Clementine Dinah Bullock in Uxbridge, Middlesex, to unmarried parents: Alexander Sylvan Campbell, a black Jamaican who worked as a building labourer and regularly busked, and Minnie Bullock, a white English farmer's daughter from Swindon, Wiltshire. The family moved round constantly, but most of Laine's childhood was spent in Southall. She attended the Board School there on Featherstone Road (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 before going to work as an apprentice hairdresser, a hat-trimmer, a librarian and in a pawnbroker's shop.
In 1946, under the name Clementina Dinah Campbell, Laine married George Langridge, a roof tiler, with whom she had a son, Stuart. The couple divorced in 1957. 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, due to her parents not being married at the time and her mother registering her under her own name.
Laine did not take up singing professionally until her mid-twenties. She auditioned successfully, at the age of 24, for John Dankworth's small group, the Dankworth Seven, and later his orchestra, with which she performed until 1958. Dankworth and Laine married that year in secret at Hampstead Register Office. The only witnesses were the couple's friend, pianist Ken Moule, and Dankworth's arranger, David Lindup. The couple had two children, who are both successful musicians in their own right: Alec who lives in the US, and Jacqui, a British singer who has released a number of albums. Laine began her career as a singer and actress. She played the lead in a new play at London's Royal Court Theatre, home of the new wave of playwrights of the 1950s such as John Osborne and Harold Pinter. 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 show-stopping Julie La Verne in Wendy Toye's production of Show Boat at the Adelphi Theatre in London in 1971.Show Boat had its longest run to date in that London season with 910 performances staged.
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