Musical theatre actress

Born: October 25 1927;

Died: August 8 2017

BARBARA Cook, who has died aged 89, was regarded by many as one of the greatest performers ever produced by the Broadway musical theatre.

Though she had considerable success as an ingénue in the 1950s and 60s, taking leading roles in early revivals of Rogers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! and Carousel and creating them for the first runs of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide and Meredith Willson’s The Music Man (winning a Tony for the latter), her talent was even more widely appreciated after she retired from musicals in 1971 and embarked on a career as a cabaret and concert performer.

If her name never achieved the wider fame of stars who had made their names in stage musicals – such as Julie Andrews, Liza Minnelli or Patti LuPone – few critics or aficionados had any doubt about her superior artistry. In 1994, after a concert at Sadler Wells in London, the Financial Times declared unequivocally: “Barbara Cook is the greatest singer in the world … the only popular singer active today who should be taken seriously by lovers of classical music.”

In 2006 (when she was almost 80), New York’s Metropolitan Opera endorsed the judgment by making her the first female popular singer ever to perform on its stage. Well into her ninth decade, she was selling out venues such as London’s Albert Hall, Washington DC’s Kennedy Center, Sydney Opera House and Carnegie Hall, New York.

One mark of the regard – amounting to awe – in which she was held by her fellow performers was shown in the filmed documentary of the concert staging of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies at New York’s Lincoln Center in September 1985. Though the rest of the cast included luminaries such as Elaine Stritch, Carol Burnett, Lee Remick, Mandy Patinkin, George Heard, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, many of them crowded into the rehearsal room to watch Cook tackle her numbers.

Though she had never previously been in one of his shows, she was Sondheim’s first choice to perform the torch songs (which included Losing My Mind) sung by Sally, a faded showgirl pushing 50. Despite her frustration in rehearsal with the fiendishly difficult intervals in In Buddy’s Eyes – “This number drives me bats!” she told the pianist – she was to spend much of her later career as one of the foremost interpreters of his songs.

Yet at that point, she had spent more than 15 years away from large stages, and for the previous decade had been performing in cabaret, where she had built a reputation as the pre-eminent interpreter of the Great American Songbook. In 1974, after a period of depression and heavy drinking following her retirement from stage musicals four years earlier, she had paired up with the pianist Wally Harper, who was to be her accompanist for more than three decades until his death in 2004.

She built up a following at small but highly exclusive cabaret spots – the St Regis Hotel and Café Carlyle in New York; the Café Royal and Pizza in the Park in London – which by the late 1980s and 1990s had became stints at major concert venues.

Barbara Cook was born on October 25 1927 in Atlanta, Georgia. Her father Charles was a travelling salesman (in hats) and her mother Nell a telephone operator. She had a sister who died in childhood and afterwards became very close (“too close,” she later thought) to her mother; they slept in the same bed until Barbara moved to New York.

She made her Broadway debut as the female lead in Flahooley (1951), a satire on politics and economics that (unsurprisingly) failed to enter the pantheon of great shows. She then took on the role of Ado Annie in what is undoubtedly one of the great shows, for the Civic Center revival of Oklahoma! and the subsequent national tour. She went on to play Carrie in the 1954 revival of Carousel before creating the part of the Amish girl Hilda in Horwitt and Hague’s Plain and Fancy, which ran for a year.

Barbara Cook then played Cunegonde in the original production of Bernstein’s operetta Candide (1956); though the show (now regarded as a classic) was not a commercial hit on its first outing, her main number, Glitter and Be Gay, which required enormous agility and range, was a showstopper. She took the romantic lead role in The Music Man (1957) as Marian, the librarian who reforms the conman who has duped an Iowa town and played Amalia in Bock and Harnick’s She Loves Me (1963), a musical adaptation of The Shop Around the Corner.

Other Broadway roles, before she retired from musicals in 1971, included Anna in a revival of Rogers and Hammerstein’s The King and I, Magnolia in the New York State Theatre’s 1966 revival of Kern and Hammerstein’s Show Boat and Fanny Brice in a national tour of Funny Girl (1967). Her talent as an actress found expression in straight plays as well, but after teaming up with Harper, her concert and cabaret work became her priority. One ill-advised exception came in 1988, when she originated the role of Margaret in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s adaptation of Stephen King’s Carrie, the production of which was as bad as the idea.

She received a Drama Desk award for her one-woman show in 1987 and was nominated for an Olivier in 1998 and two more in 2001; in 1994 she was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame.

She married, in 1952, David LeGrant, with whom she had a son. They divorced in 1962. She announced her retirement from performing earlier this year.

ANDREW MCKIE