Natalie Cole’s success was simply Unforgettable
1991 hit mixed her voice with her father’s
L OS A NGELES • Natalie Cole, the Grammy- winning daughter of Nat King Cole who carried on her late father’s musical legacy and, through technology, shared a duet with him on Unforgettable, has died. She was 65.
Cole died Thursday evening at Cedars- Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles due to compilations from ongoing health issues, her family said.
“Natalie fought a fierce, courageous battle, dying how she lived ... with dignity, strength and honour. Our be- loved mother and sister will be greatly missed and remain UNFORGETTABLE in our hearts forever,” read the statement from her son Robert Yancy and sisters Timolin and Casey Cole.
Cole had battled drug problems and hepatitis that forced her to undergo a kidney transplant in May 2009. Cole’s older sister, Carol “Cookie” Cole, died the day she received the transplant. Their brother, Nat Kelly Cole, died in 1995.
Natalie Cole was inspired by her dad at an early age and auditioned to sing with him when she was just 11. She was 15 when he died of lung cancer, in 1965.
She began as an R&B singer but later gravitated toward the smooth pop and jazz standards that her father loved.
Cole’s greatest success came with her 1991 album, “Unforgettable ... With Love,” which paid tribute to her father with reworked versions of some of his best-known songs. Her voice was overlaid with her father’s in the title cut, offering a delicate duet a quarter-century after his death.
The album sold some 14 million copies and won six Grammys.
While making the album, Cole said in an interview in 1991, she had to “throw out every R&B lick that I had ever learned and every pop trick I had ever learned. With him, the music was in the background and the voice was in the front.”
“I didn’t shed really any real tears until the album was over,” Cole said. “Then I cried a whole lot. When we started the project it was a way of reconnecting with my dad. Then when we did the last song, I had to say goodbye again.”
Born in 1950 to Nat King Cole and his wife, Maria Ellington, Cole made her recording debut in 1975 with Inseparable. The music industry welcomed her with two Grammy awards — one for best new artist and one for best female R& B vocal performance for her buoyant hit This Will Be (An Everlasting Love).
In her 2000 autobiography, Angel on My Shoulder, she discussed how she had battled heroin, crack cocaine and alcohol addiction for years. When she announced in 2008 that she had been diagnosed with hepatitis C, she blamed her past intravenous drug use.
Cole toured through much of her illness, often receiving dialysis at hospitals around the globe. “I think that I am a walking testimony to you can have scars,” she told People magazine. “You can go through turbulent times and still have victory in your life.”