The Press and Journal (Inverness, Highlands, and Islands)
Goodbye to Dolly, Carol Channing
Broadway star Carol Channing, who delighted audiences over almost 5,000 performances as the scheming Dolly Levi in Hello, Dolly, has died aged 97.
Her publicist said she died of natural causes yesterday in Rancho Mirage, California. She had had two strokes in the last year.
Channing starred in other shows but none with equal magnetism.
Her outsized personality seemed too much for the screen, and she made only a few films.
Over the years, Channing continued as Dolly in national tours, the last in 1996, when she was in her 70s. Tom Shales of The Washington Post called her “the ninth wonder of the world”.
Channing was born on January 31 1921 in Seattle where her father, George Channing, was a newspaper editor.
When she was three months old, he moved to San Francisco.
At the age of seven, Channing decided she wanted to become an entertainer.
While majoring in drama and dance at Bennington College in Vermont, she was sent off to get experience in her chosen field.
She found a job in a New York revue, Lend An Ear. The show lasted two weeks but a New Yorker magazine critic commented: “You will hear more about a satiric chanteuse named Carol Channing.”
She said later: “That was it. I said goodbye to trigonometry, zoology and English literature.”
For several years she worked as an understudy and bit player.
But playing the innocent gold digger in the musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes assured her stardom. The show’s hit song, Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend, became her signature number.
Channing had two early marriages that ended in divorce.
In 1956 she married television producer Charles Lowe.
He supervised every aspect of her business affairs and appearances but, after 41 years of marriage, she sued for divorce in 1998, alleging that he misappropriated her funds and humiliated her in public.
Channing moved to Rancho Mirage near Palm Springs, California, in 2000 to write her memoirs.
She called the book Just Lucky, I Guess.
She remarried in 2003 to Harry Kullijian, her childhood sweetheart from 70 years before. He died in 2011.