Dame Cleo Laine
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Dame Cleo Laine DBE |
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Laine in 2007
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| Background information | |
| Birth name | Clementine Dinah Bullock |
| Born |
28 October 1927 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. Her early influences as a singer were Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and Lena Horne
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