Carol Channing, the raspy-voiced star who created two of Broadway’s unforgettable characters and songs, in Hello, Dolly! and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, has died. She was 97.
She died on Tuesday at her home in Rancho Mirage, Calif., according to the New York Times, citing her publicist, B. Harlan Boll. She had two strokes in the past year.
Channing’s five-decade career included cabaret, film and television as well as the theater, where she won her greatest acclaim with a gravelly voice, wide smile and platinum blond bouffant — which she achieved through wigs, as she was allergic to bleach.
She starred as Arkansas gold digger Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which opened on Broadway in 1949. She popularized the song Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend along with Marilyn Monroe, who played Lorelei in the 1953 film version.
In Hello, Dolly!, Jerry Herman’s musical version of the Thornton Wilder play The Matchmaker, Channing used her bubbly wit to play the gaudy, self-assured title role of Dolly Gallagher Levi. New York Times theater critic Brooks Atkinson hailed her “shrewdly mischievous performance.”
All told, on Broadway and off, she played Dolly in 5,000 performances over 30 years, earning $5 million in her last tour, a 30th-anniversary production that began on Broadway in 1995.
Carol Elaine Channing was born on Jan. 31, 1921, in Seattle, the only child of George Channing, a newspaper editor, and the former Adelaide Glaser. It wasn’t until she wrote her 2002 autobiography that she disclosed the family secret that her father’s mother had been black.
“I was 16 years old and my mother told me,” she said on CNN’s Larry King Live.
She grew up in San Francisco and briefly studied theater at Bennington College in Vermont. Her first stage appearance was in 1941 as a singer in No for an Answer, a play that ran three performances.
In 1949, she got her first starring role, as Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes on Broadway, and went on its national tour from 1951 to 1953.
She went on to star in dozens of Broadway and touring plays, including Pygmalion and Wonderful Town.
Channing won Tony and New York Drama Critics awards for best actress in a musical and was given a Tony Award for lifetime achievement in 1995.