The Broadway star who was the definitive Dolly

Carol Channing was an inimitable and unstoppable Broadway force for more than seven decades. Standing 6 feet in stockings, with saucer-wide eyes, an elastic smile, and a voice that could shift from a growl to a squeak, the actress first dazzled audiences in 1949 as Lorelei Lee, an innocent gold digger from Little Rock, Ark., in the original production of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. But the role that would define her came in 1964, when she appeared as the sweet, scheming matchmaker Dolly Gallagher Levi in Hello, Dolly! Channing would play Dolly more than 5,000 times, on the Great White Way and on tour, and nothing could keep her from the limelight. Over the years, she appeared onstage in a sling, a neck brace, and a wheelchair. “Don’t worry about learning the part,” Channing would tell understudies. “You’ll never have to go on.” Raised in San Francisco “in a devout Christian Scientist household,” Channing discovered her calling as a girl while delivering copies of the Christian Science Monitor to a theater, said HuffingtonPost.com. “This is a temple,” she recalled thinking. “I stood there and wanted to kiss the floorboards.” Channing briefly studied drama and dance at Bennington College in Vermont before heading to New York City to pursue acting. She worked as a bit player and nightclub impressionist and took “jobs as a model, receptionist, and sales clerk during lean times,” said the Associated Press. After being cast in Blondes, Channing’s stardom was guaranteed. One critic hailed her Lee as “the most fabulous comic creation of this dreary period in history,” and the show gave Channing an unforgettable signature song: “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.”

The debut of Hello, Dolly! was greeted with rave reviews, and the show won 10 Tony Awards, including one for Channing as Best Actress in a Musical. Her vivacious personality didn’t translate to the big screen—she looked “almost manic” in 1967’s Thoroughly Modern Millie— and she appeared in few movies, said The Daily Telegraph (U.K.). The theater remained her true home and Dolly her favorite role. She played the part for the final time on Broadway in 1995, at age 74, and then headed off on a worldwide tour with the production. “Performing is the only excuse for my existence,” she said that year. “What can be better than this?”