Possessing one of the most inspirational voices on this planet of ours, singer-actress-writer CLEO LAINE, who died aged 97 on 24 July 2025, had an extraordinary career that lasted nigh on 70 years. Michael Darvell looks back at the life and career of this amazing and legendary jazz, classical and pop singer who had a swooping four-octave contralto voice that was like no other…
Cleo Laine was born in Southall, Middlesex, west of London, the second child of Sylvan Alexander Campbell and Minnie Blanche Bullock. Laine’s birth name was Clementine Dinah Bullock (her mother’s maiden name). Her father was a Jamaican building labourer and busker, while her mother was from an English family from Wiltshire whose parents had died before their daughter’s first marriage.
The family moved around west London and Laine was brought up in Southall where her mother sent her for singing and dancing lessons. She had a sister and a brother and all three were extras in Alexander Korda’s film The Thief of Bagdad in 1940, marking the beginning of Laine’s long career in showbusiness, before which she had worked for a hairdresser, a hat-trimmer, a shoe-mender, in a pawnshop and as a librarian.
In the early 1950s she joined the Johnny Dankworth Seven, a small jazz group which later developed into Johnny Dankworth and His Orchestra and His New Radio Orchestra with which Laine sang until 1958 when John and Cleo married. Taking time off from gigs, Laine started acting at the Royal Court in London and then she appeared in the Sandy Wilson musical Valmouth, based on the novel by Ronald Firbank. Other theatre appearances included the title role in Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler and playing Julie in Wendy Toye’s production of Jerome Kern’s Show Boat in 1971. At London’s Adelphi Theatre it notched up over 900 performances, its longest run since the show opened on Broadway in 1927.
Show Boat was an early example of a ‘serious] musical in that it dealt with such themes as racial prejudice and tragic love. It was a mixture of drama and comedy but kept the regular song and dance elements familiar at the time, to form a complete piece of entertainment. The show is set in the American Deep South mainly populated by white people. Laine played Julie La Verne, a mulatto woman of mixed African and European ancestry, who falls in love with a white man. This theme gave the show its backbone, a quality that did not resurface in a Broadway show until 1943 in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! Up until then American musicals were just musical comedies – great songs but with little substance. Show Boat gave Laine the chance to sing numbers such as ‘Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man’ and ‘Bill’ and she certainly proved she could act up a storm.
Laine and Dankworth also had success with recordings of theatre work including Shakespeare and All That Jazz with Dankworth”s settings of Shakespeare quotations written for a jazz score. Laine appeared at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Kurt Weill’s The Seven Deadly Sins. In 1979 Dankworth wrote Colette, a musical for his wife, based on the writings of the French author. Cleo also appeared in a production of Sondheim’s A Little Night Music in 1983 as Desiree and in Franz Lehar’s The Merry Widow (conducted by Dankworth) at Michigan Opera. In Los Angeles she originated the role of Princess Puffer in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Rupert Holmes’ musical adaptation of Charles Dickens’ unfinished novel. She also played the Witch in Sondheim’s Into the Woods.
In 1970 Dankworth and Laine founded The Stables, a concert venue that was also a source of musical education in Wavendon, their home in Buckinghamshire. It was a great success and still is, featuring music of all sorts in hundreds of concerts every year.
It’s quite possible that without Wavendon the musical compilation Side by Side by Sondheim might never have seen the light of day. Laine asked David Kernan to create a revue for a benefit performance at The Stables. The actor brought in director Ned Sherrin as narrator for a whistle-stop tour through the Sondheim catalogue. Working with writer Caryl Brahms, Sherrin put together a batch of Sondheim songs – both known and unknown – and Kernan, Millicent Martin and Julia McKenzie with a piano duo performed them according to themes which included love, marriage, disappointment etc, culling songs from Company, Follies, Anyone Can Whistle, A Little Night Music, Do I Hear a Waltz?, West Side Story, Gypsy, Pacific Overtures etc, including songs that were cut from some of the shows. It was a hit at The Stables and went on to open in London’s Mermaid Theatre in May 1976, then Wyndham’s and the Garrick. It played New York and was subsequently staged around the world – all from a suggstion by Laine. It remains a good showcase for any musical company.
Apart from appearing globally in concerts Laine released well over 50 albums of varied music, working with the best in the business including Tubby Hayes, Annie Ross, John Williams, Ray Charles, James Galway, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Tunick (Sondheim’s orchestrator), Mel Tormé, Michael Tilson Thomas, Duke Ellington and, nearer home, Laurie Holloway and, of course, husband John Dankworth. In 1992 she appeared at the Royal Albert Hall with Frank Sinatra. She had five Grammy nominations, winning one for Best Jazz Vocal Performance, Female in 1986 plus Lifetime Achievement Awards from various sectors of the music industry and many honorary doctorates from universities in both the UK and the US.
The musical couple that were Cleo Laine and John Dankworth knew no bounds because together and separately they put the serious art of all kinds of music appreciation on the map. Laine toured Australia, recorded more albums, appeared at Lincoln Center in New York as well as Carnegie Hall many times. There were tours of the US and Canada, television appearances – most notably on The Muppet Show – and eventually she achieved a Grammy Award for her 1983 Carnegie Hall concert. In fact she never stopped touring and continued to perform up to the age of 90. She was made an OBE in 1979. She published two books, Cleo, an autobiography, in 1984, and You Can Sing If You Want To, a vade mecum on learning how to use the voice as a musical instrument, in 1997.
Cleo Laine was first married from 1946 to builder George Langridge and they were together for 11 years and had a son, Stuart. Laine and Dankworth married in 1958 and they had a son Alec, who became a double-bass player and bandleader, and a daughter, Jacqui, a singer-songwriter and actress. John Dankworth died in 2010. Stuart died in 2019. Alec, Jacqui and The Stables all continue the family business of entertaining and educating the public with their music.
Cleo Laine herself will always be remembered for the consummate artist she was, for the range of her voice and the breadth of music she performed, and her abiding interest in musical education. Quite simply she is irreplaceable and there will never be any other like her.
Cleo Laine: born 28 October 1927, died 24 July 2025. R.I.P.
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