Morgana King, jazz singer who played Brando’s wife in ‘Godfather’ films, dies at 87
Morgana King, a boldly original jazz singer with a four-octave voice and dramatic stage presence who was perhaps better known for portraying Marlon Brando’s wife in the first two Godfather movies, died March 22 in Palm Springs, Calif. She was 87.
Her death, which had not previously been reported, was confirmed by the Riverside County coroner’s office. A representative from the office said the cause was non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
King performed in nightclubs for more than 50 years and recorded about 20 albums, yet her fame never equaled her acclaim. She had a modest hit in 1964 with “A Taste of Honey,” but for most of her career she remained an exacting, uncompromising and even defiant song stylist.
“I am a rebel,” she told the Bergen Record in 1988. “I am not a commercial artist. If I don’t believe in something, I won’t do it. I don’t believe in superstardom, publicity stunts and plugging records . ... The only thing I believe in is music. I won’t forfeit anything for that.”
She began performing in nightclubs in her teens and, according to a 2016 article in JazzTimes, once sang “Body and Soul” for Billie Holiday in her dressing room, prompting the jazz great to say, “Take care of this baby, ’cause that’s my child.”
In addition to Holiday, King’s admirers included Frank Sinatra, Duke Ellington, Dinah Washington and opera star Eileen Farrell. With her haunting vocal style, she could float to the heights with a breathy intimacy, then dip into a rich, bluesy middle range with supple, pitch-perfect control.
“She is a unique performer,” New York Times jazz critic John Wilson wrote in 1972, “a one-of-a-kind individualist who can be related to no other singer except, distantly but quite favorably, to Billie Holiday.”
King was among the first singers to adopt the new Brazilian bossa nova style of music in the early 1960s, and her career blossomed with “A Taste of Honey” in the mid’60s. But as rock ’n’ roll came to dominate radio and the popular charts, she was pushed toward the musical margins. A severe car accident in 1969 left her in a hospital for months and kept her from singing for more than a year.
She had long harbored theatrical ambitions but had never acted before being cast in the role of Carmela Corleone, the long-suffering wife of the mob boss played by Brando, in Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather” (1972). She had virtually no spoken lines in the film, but she appeared in a memorable wedding scene, singing the Italian song “Luna Mezz’o Mare.”
King said she had to be talked into doing the movie, but she “knew the culture, the psychology” of the world of “The Godfather” from her Sicilian-born parents.
“Francis would ask me if the set looked like a real Sicilian house,” she said in 1988. “I told him to put a statue of St. Anthony on the wall.”
She was also in the 1974 sequel, “The Godfather: Part II.” After her character died, King refused to get into a coffin, for superstitious reasons. The body lying in the coffin in the film was Coppola’s mother.
Maria Grazia Messina was born June 4, 1930, in Pleasantville, N.Y., and grew up in New York City. Her father sold ice and coal and was a self-taught musician. He died when his daughter was 11.