Anna Russell
| Anna Russell | |
|---|---|
Russell in 1965.
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| Born |
Anna Claudia Russell-Brown 27 December 1911 Maida Vale, London, England |
| Died | 18 October 2006 (aged 94) Rosedale, New South Wales, Australia |
| Occupation | Vocalist comedian |
Anna Russell, née Anna Claudia Russell-Brown (27 December 1911 – 18 October 2006) was an English–Canadian singer and comedian. She gave many concerts in which she sang and played comic musical sketches on the piano. Among her best-known works are her concert performances and famous recordings of The Ring of the Nibelungs (An Analysis) – a humorous 22-minute synopsis of Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen – and (on the same album) her parody How to Write Your Own Gilbert and Sullivan Opera.
Russell was born in Maida Vale, London, England, and was educated at St Felix School at Southwold, Suffolk, at Harrogate College and in Brussels and Paris. She studied at the Royal College of Music, where her piano teacher was Marmaduke Barton (whose wife's maiden name happened also to be Anna Russell). She had a difficult childhood, and particularly a difficult relationship with her mother, who often shipped her off to live with other relatives for some time. Russell was twice married and divorced, first to John Denison and second to artist Charles Goldhamer. In her "Who's Who" entry she described herself as single.
In one of Russell's comic routines she said that some of the world's greatest teachers had completely ruined her voice, going on to relate that she was interrupted early in her graduation song recital by the Royal College's judges who indicated her singing was a joke. Whether this was literally true or not, it is a fact that she began to think of what she might be able to do with the voice and technique she had.
Russell's early career included a few engagements in opera (including a disastrous appearance as a substitute Santuzza in a British touring production of Cavalleria rusticana, where she clumsily tripped on a set piece and pulled it down – an event later used in her comedy) – as well as appearances as a folk singer on BBC radio in 1931. Russell's mother was Canadian, and the family returned in 1939 to Toronto, after her father's death, where she began to appear on local radio stations as an entertainer. By 1940, she was beginning to find success as a soloist on the concert stage in Canada. Russell's first one-woman show as a parodist was sponsored by the Toronto Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire in 1942, though it was the Canadian conductor Sir Ernest MacMillan who really set her on her international career as a "musical cartoonist", when he invited her to take part in his annual burlesque Christmas Box Symphony Concert in 1944. Russell made her New York City debut in her one-woman show in 1948, which she toured throughout North America, Britain, Australia and the rest of the English-speaking world.
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