Carol Channing

Carol Channing devoted most of her career to comic roles on stage, where she also sang, while taking occasional parts in films and on television. Tall and slender, with wide eyes and a voice that swung between a childlike squeak and a deep growl, she projected an outsized presence that found its ideal vehicles in two defining characters: Lorelei Lee from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Dolly Levi from Hello, Dolly!

She enrolled at Bennington College to study dance and drama before relocating to New York, where she first sang in nightclubs and then made her Broadway entrance as a chorus member in No for an Answer on January 5, 1941. Later that year she served as understudy in the musical Let's Face It!, which opened October 29. After moving west she modeled and continued appearing in Los Angeles clubs until she joined the cast of the revue Lend an Ear. The show transferred from the West Coast and reached Broadway on December 16, 1948, completing 460 performances. Her satirical portrait of a 1920s flapper in that production secured her the lead in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which premiered December 8, 1949, and adapted Anita Loos’s novel; portraying the fortune-hunting Lorelei Lee, she became an overnight Broadway sensation with her rendition of “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” The production logged 740 performances, and its cast album reached the Top Ten in 1950.

Her screen debut came the same year with a minor role in the drama Paid in Full. Club dates and early television work filled the first half of the decade. In 1954 she succeeded Rosalind Russell in the Broadway musical Wonderful Town, then headlined The Vamp, which opened November 10, 1955, and closed after a short run. She appeared in the 1956 comedy The First Traveling Saleslady before returning to Broadway in the essentially solo vehicle Show Girl on January 12, 1961; it played three months on Broadway and then toured successfully. Hello, Dolly!, which opened January 15, 1964, marked her greatest triumph: she received the Tony Award, and the gold-certified cast album topped the charts. She remained with the show for eighteen months on Broadway before touring with it through 1967. That year she earned an Academy Award nomination for her performance in the film musical Thoroughly Modern Millie and joined the ensemble cast of the 1968 comedy Skidoo.

Throughout the late sixties and seventies she balanced television appearances with an international schedule of musicals, plays, and revues that included Carol Channing with Her Stout-Hearted Men in 1970, Four on a Garden in 1971, Cabaret and Festival at Ford’s in 1972, and Carol Channing and Her Gentlemen Who Prefer Blondes later that year. In 1973 she launched a revised production of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes retitled Lorelei; it reached Broadway on January 24, 1974, finished the season there, and continued touring into 1975. She revisited her signature role in a national tour of Hello, Dolly! that arrived on Broadway March 5, 1978. Also in 1978 she made a cameo appearance in the film Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. She teamed with Mary Martin for a 1986 tour of the play Legends and, ten years later, took a thirtieth-anniversary production of Hello, Dolly! back on the road, returning with it to Broadway in 1995.