Carol
Channing, star of Hello, Dolly! on Broadway, dies aged 97
Courtesy of https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2019/jan/15/carol-channing-star-of-hello-dolly-on-broadway-dies-aged-97
Celebrated for her performances in Gentlemen
Prefer Blondes and Hello, Dolly! Channing also earned an Oscar nomination for
Thoroughly Modern Millie
Carol Channing, the American actor who originated the roles of Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and the eponymous heroine of Hello, Dolly! on Broadway, has died aged 97, her publicist has announced.
Channing played the matchmaking widow Dolly Levi more
than 5,000 times across three Broadway runs
from the 1960s to the 1990s and on tours around the world. The part had been
turned down by Ethel Merman but Channing made it her own, donning a hat as
feathery as her eyelashes and a red sequinned gown. The musical, based on a
Thornton Wilder play and written by Michael Stewart and Jerry Herman, won
several Tony awards upon its premiere including best actress in a musical for
Channing. She claimed to have missed only one performance as Dolly, after a
bout of food poisoning in Kalamazoo, Michigan. When she returned to the role in
her mid-70s, in the 1995 revival, the New York Times critic Vincent Canby
concluded: “World, beware: it’s possible this woman is a substance that should
be legally controlled.”
A sparkling entertainer with bright eyes, a megawatt
smile, a gorgeously gravelly voice and, frequently, a platinum bob wig,
Channing was a natural performer. The only child of George Channing, a
journalist, and Adelaide (née Glaser), she was born in Seattle in 1921 and
loved to sing as a child. Channing excelled at imitating her teachers and
fellow students at school in San Francisco (she remained a fine impersonator)
and later attended Bennington College in Vermont. She was raised as a Christian
Scientist and was entranced by the magic of the theatre when she delivered
copies of The Christian Science Monitor newspaper to the stage door of a local
playhouse.
Inspired by Ethel Waters, she set out to become a performer. “There wasn’t an inch of
the entertainment field I didn’t investigate,” she wrote in her memoir Just
Lucky I Guess. “I auditioned for anyone who would look.” She was accepted into
the San Francisco Ballet as a teenager, performed comedy at the Borscht Belt
summer resorts in upstate New York’s Catskill mountains, and began to get roles
on Broadway after understudying Eve Arden in the musical comedy Let’s Face It!
co-starring Danny Kaye.
Anita Loos, the author of the 1925 comic novel
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, saw her on stage in the satirical revue Lend An Ear
and proclaimed: “There’s my Lorelei.” Channing was swiftly cast in her first
leading role as the gleeful, gold-digging Lorelei Lee, the Little Rock flapper
who believes diamonds are a girl’s best friend, in the musical based on the
novel. After it opened in 1949, she became an instant star and Time magazine
put her on its cover. When the musical became a movie in 1953, Marilyn
Monroe was given the role of Lorelei.
Channing said that Noël Coward once
offered her a role but she turned it down; he later told her she was a “silly
ox” for not accepting. But after her run as Lorelei she appeared in more
Broadway musicals – Wonderful Town, The Vamp and Show Girl – and also had film
roles, including the 1956 movie The First Traveling Saleslady which
cast her and a young Clint
Eastwood as a couple. It also gave Channing a song, A Corset Can Do a Lot for a Lady.
Her most successful film role was as the
nightclub singer Muzzy Van Hossmere, fond of quaffing champagne and proclaiming
“raspberries!” in Thoroughly
Modern Millie, which brought her an Oscar nomination in 1968 (she
lost to Estelle Parsons for Bonnie and Clyde). Channing was furious to find Barbra
Streisand cast in the film version of Hello, Dolly! – she said
it was “like somebody had kidnapped my baby” – but was glad to play the part
over many decades on stage. She also returned to her other signature theatre
role in a 1974 Broadway sequel to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, entitled Lorelei.
Following the 30th anniversary tour of Hello, Dolly!, in
1995 she received a lifetime achievement Tony award. Her memoir was published in 2002. Channing was married four
times and had a son, the cartoonist Channing Lowe.
