A star too dazzling for celluloid
P 43
Carol Channing 1921-2019
A superstar of the New York stage, Carol Channing was best known for two great roles. In 1949, she created the part of the gold-digging Lorelei Lee in the musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. With her showstopping rendition of Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend, the show ran for 700 performances. Fifteen years later, Channing, who has died aged 97, starred as the matchmaking widow Dolly Levi in the first production of Hello, Dolly!, and brought the house down. When those musicals were turned into films, her parts went to other actresses – Marilyn Monroe and Barbra Streisand – and her own big-screen career never took off. But with her saucer eyes and long fake lashes, deep rasping voice and letterbox mouth, she remained a hugely distinctive presence on Broadway, beloved by the critics and the public alike – and continued to star as Dolly in revivals all over the world. “Performing is the only excuse for my existence,” she said in 1995, as she reprised the role for the last time on Broadway, aged 74. “What can be better than this?”
Carol Elaine Channing was born in 1921, the only child of George, a newspaper editor whom she adored, and Adelaide – a volatile woman with whom she had a difficult relationship. When she was 16, her mother told her that her paternal grandmother was African American, though she could not be sure this was true. Brought up in San Francisco, she discovered her talent for making people laugh when, aged seven, she began doing impersonations of her teachers. She studied dance and drama at college, then set off for New York. After several false starts, her break finally came in 1948, when she appeared in the revue Lend an Ear – and was spotted by Anita Loos, the screenwriter who wrote the bestselling book Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925) and co-wrote the musical.
In the book, Lorelei Lee is “five foot two with eyes of blue”; Channing was nearly six foot tall, and dark eyed, but Loos was convinced Channing was right for the role, and indeed, she electrified the critics. As Time put it: “Perhaps once in a decade a nova explodes above the Great White Way with enough brilliance to reillumine the whole gaudy legend of show business.” She played the role for two years on Broadway, then took it on tour for another year. She then toured as Eliza in Pygmalion, starred in Wonderful Town on Broadway and created her own nightclub act.
Then came Hello, Dolly!, based on a play by Thornton Wilder, which opened in 1964 and won ten Tonys. Channing appeared in 1,272 consecutive performances and three revivals. By the mid-1990s, she reckoned she’d played Dolly 5,000 times, and that in all those years, she had missed only one show. “Don’t worry about learning the part,” she’d tell her understudies, “You’ll never have to go on.” When Streisand was cast in the film, Channing was devastated (and admitted to having been delighted when the film flopped). She also reprised her role as Lorelei in 1974, by which time her hair had been so damaged by bleach, she’d taken to wearing wigs. “George Burns once told me, ‘If men don’t prefer blondes, you’ve wasted a lot of money on peroxide.’”
For years, she had had a parallel career on TV, said The Guardian, making guest appearances on variety shows; but she made few feature films, perhaps because she was too exuberant a personality for cinema. Her most notable film role was in Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967), which won her an Oscar nomination. She was married four times, and was twice divorced. Her last husband was a farmer who had been her high school sweetheart; he died in 2011. She is survived by her son, Channing Carson, a political cartoonist. Still performing in her 90s, she had, she said, devoted her life to the stage, and had no plans to take it easy. “What am I supposed to save myself for?” she told Vanity Fair. “Something that I don’t do that well, like tennis? Sitting on the beach?”