Elisabeth Welch; Independent (UK) obit
Hyfler/Rosner
Black diva whose roles ranged from Cole Porter's 'Nymph Errant' to Derek
Jarman's 'The Tempest'
16 July 2003
Elisabeth Margaret Welch, actress and singer: born New York 27
February 1904; married 1928 Luke Smith (died 1936); died Northolt, Middlesex
15 July 2003.
For six decades Elisabeth Welch was one of the most popular American singers
working in Britain and a permanent fixture on the West End musical stage,
from Cole Porter's Nymph Errant in 1933 to the all-star concert A Time to
Start Living in 1992, a World Aids Day gala organised by Crusaid, for which
the cream of British show business gathered to pay tribute to her.
Both Cole Porter and Ivor Novello wrote songs for her. When she appeared as
"A Goddess" in Derek Jarman's imaginative 1979 screen version of
Shakespeare's The Tempest - dressed in gold from head to foot, walking
through a rain of confetti in a room garlanded with flowers, and singing
"Stormy Weather" to a group of handsome young sailors - George Melly
described it as "arguably the campest, most sparkling moment in the history
of cinema".
Welch regarded herself as American by birth, but English in thought and
interest (London was her home for 70 years). She thus stood apart from other
African-American women entertainers of her generation including the
extrovert Josephine Baker and the dynamic, politically outspoken Lena Horne.
However, when a curious journalist enquired about the singing technique she
had sustained for over 80 years, her simple, direct reply was: "I have no
technique. No art, no training. Nothing! Just myself. I describe myself as a
singer of popular songs."
She was born in New York in 1904, the daughter of John Wesley Welch, a head
gardener and coachman on a large estate in Englewood, New Jersey, and
Elizabeth Key (some 20 years his junior), who was born in Leith, Edinburgh,
of Scottish and Irish ancestry. Key had travelled to America when she was in
her mid-teens and worked as an assistant to the nanny of the family that
John Welch worked for in Englewood.
John Welch was of mixed race: African-American and American Indian, of the
Lenape tribe in Wilmington, Delaware. He said that his mother had been run
off the reservation for marrying an African. Elisabeth Welch grew up with
her two brothers, Edward and John, in a racially mixed neighbourhood. She
later said:
I never had any feeling about being different from anybody else. It equipped
me to be an international person all my life.
Welch was educated at Public School 69 and Julia Richman High School. As a
youngster she belonged to St Cyprian's, a local Episcopalian church and
community centre where she started singing in the church choir at the age of
eight and became known as "the loud alto" because of her strong voice.
Although she had originally planned to become a social worker, Welch found
herself drawn to the stage and throughout the Twenties she appeared in a
succession of black Broadway shows at the height of the Jazz Age. After
making her début in Liza in 1922, she was chosen to introduce the song
"Charleston" in Runnin' Wild the following year, thus launching the famous
dance craze.
In 1924 Welch appeared in Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake's The Chocolate
Dandies with Josephine Baker, but she preferred to describe her professional
stage début as Lew Leslie's Blackbirds of 1928, starring Adelaide Hall and
the legendary dancer Bill "Bojangles" Robinson. During the run of
Blackbirds, Welch made her first recordings and married the jazz musician
Luke Smith Jnr. (His brother Joe, the cornet player, often accompanied the
blues legends Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters.) However, the marriage was
short-lived and Luke Smith died in 1936.
In 1929 Welch travelled with the cast of Blackbirds to Paris, where they
became a hit at the Moulin Rouge. The following year she returned to Paris
to launch her cabaret career, following the likes of Josephine Baker, Ada
(Bricktop) Smith and the British-born Mabel Mercer. Welch became a favourite
cabaret star of Parisian café society, singing in the original Boeuf sur le
Toit and Le Grand Ecart - two smart Parisian cocktail and dinner clubs
designed by Jean Cocteau. "They were the kind of places where Bohemians and
intellectuals came," she recalled. "The Paris equivalent of the Bloomsbury
set - Gertrude Stein, Picasso, F. Scott Fitzgerald." She later replaced
Mercer at Chez Florence.
In 1931, during a cabaret engagement in New York, Welch was asked to replace
the singer of Cole Porter's "Love for Sale" in the Broadway musical The New
Yorkers. For Welch, "Love for Sale", a prostitute's lament, was "beautiful
poetry because it was like one of the street cries of London".
On her return to Paris, Welch met Cole Porter and, she recalled:
He asked me to come to his famous apartment. I went knowing that I was going
to meet a great man. He was absolutely charming. I've always adored Cole
Porter. He has meant something in my life but it's very difficult to rate
one songwriter above the other or one below the other. Perhaps the only
lyricist who rivalled Cole Porter's wit was Lorenz Hart, who was quiet and
highly sensitive. He was a poet and a romantic. His songs were beautiful and
full of feeling. He was a man who was in love with love. So was Ivor
Novello, a great romantic.
In 1933 Porter sent for Welch to come to London and join the cast of Nymph
Errant, a musical he had written for Gertrude Lawrence. "He said he had a
song for me." She arrived with a contract from the show's producer, Charles
B. Cochran, but, while she was waiting for rehearsals to begin, Cochran gave
her permission to make her London début in Dark Doings at the Leicester
Square Theatre. In this revue, Welch introduced to Britain Harold Arlen and
Ted Koehler's hit torch song "Stormy Weather" and it became her signature
tune.
When Nymph Errant opened at the Adelphi in October 1933, Welch stopped the
show with Porter's "Solomon". Novello saw her in Nymph Errant and cast her
in another West End triumph, Glamorous Night, at Drury Lane in 1935 in which
Novello himself co-starred with Mary Ellis. Once again, Welch stopped the
show, this time with a lilting blues song which Novello had written for her,
"Far Away in Shanty Town".
In 1934 she shared top billing at the London Palladium with Cab Calloway and
by the mid-1930s her name had become well-known to the British public with
her regular appearances in a popular BBC radio series called Soft Lights and
Sweet Music. She also made her first film appearance, in Death at
Broadcasting House (1934).
Welch appeared with Florence Desmond in 1936 in the revue Let's Raise the
Curtain at the Victoria Palace and co-starred with the African-American
singer and activist Paul Robeson in the film Song of Freedom. She recalled:
Of course Paul tried to persuade me to make a stand for black people. Well,
I had an answer. I'm of mixed blood: African, Native American Indian, Scots
and Irish. I said: "Paul, I can't make a stand for all of them. You must
excuse me!" He laughed really hard at that, and gave me a big hug.
Also in 1936 Welch made her first television appearances in light musical
items for the BBC. These were broadcast live from Alexandra Palace. On stage
she appeared with Doris Hare in the revue It's in the Bag (1937) at the
Saville Theatre and with Stanley Holloway and Anton Dolin in All the Best
(1938) at Blackpool's Opera House. She also started to tour variety theatres
and made further film appearances in Alexander Korda's Over the Moon (1937)
and Big Fella (1937), again with Robeson.
When the Second World War broke out, Welch decided to stay in London. "All
my friends were here," she said, "and I was determined to stay." Together
with Evelyn Laye, Kay Hammond and Douglas Byng, Welch entertained the troops
at Army and Royal Air Force camps throughout Britain, and in 1942 she
travelled to Malta and Gibraltar with an all-star cast that included John
Gielgud, Edith Evans, Beatrice Lillie and Michael Wilding in a special
entertainment for the Forces organised by Hugh "Binkie" Beaumont. Gielgud
said: "You could hear a pin drop while she sang, but when she finished the
thunder of applause could be heard in the street."
In 1941 Welch played her first non-singing role in the theatre in No Time
for Comedy at the Haymarket. Rex Harrison, Lilli Palmer and Diana Wynyard
co-starred. Other wartime stage appearances included Sky High (1942) with
Hermione Baddeley and Hermione Gingold at the Phoenix; We're All in It
(1943) at Blackpool's Opera House with Wilfred Pickles; Ivor Novello's Arc
de Triomphe (1943), also at the Phoenix; and Happy and Glorious (1944) with
Tommy Trinder which ran for a record-breaking 20 months at the London
Palladium. She also appeared in two Ealing films: Fiddlers Three (1944) with
Tommy Trinder and Dead of Night (1945) with Michael Redgrave.
After the war, Welch became one of Britain's leading stars of intimate
revue. In Tuppence Coloured (1947), with Joyce Grenfell and Max Adrian,
devised and directed by Laurier Lister, she introduced Edith Piaf's
signature tune "La Vie en Rose" to the British public. The success of this
revue led to others, including Oranges and Lemons (1949) and Penny Plain
(1951). Other West End triumphs included Peter Greenwell and Peter
Wildeblood's The Crooked Mile (1959) with Millicent Martin and Caryl Brahms
and Ned Sherrin's Cindy-Ella (1962) with Cleo Laine.
On radio she acted in Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country (1955), Ronald
Firbank's The Princess Zoubaroff (1962) with Edith Evans, George Bernard
Shaw's Back to Methuselah (1966) and Sandy Wilson's Valmouth (1975). Her
television career continued with No Time for Comedy (1954), Mrs Patterson
(1956) with Eartha Kitt, Truman Capote's The Grass Harp (1957), The Rise and
Fall of Nellie Brown (1964: a musical specially written for her), Take a
Sapphire (1966) and The Moon and Sixpence (1967).
In 1969, on the occasion of Noël Coward's 70th birthday, she took part in A
Talent to Amuse, a tribute at the Phoenix, and in 1970 she began a long
succession of one-woman shows with A Marvellous Party at the Hampstead
Theatre, which continued into the 1990s.
Welch returned in triumph to the West End musical stage in Pippin (1973),
directed by Bob Fosse, and a revival of Cindy-Ella (1976), while on
television she appeared in Song by Song by Lorenz Hart (1978) and Song by
Song by Cole Porter (1980). In 1979 she took part in her first Royal Variety
Performance and her first pantomime, Sandy Wilson's Aladdin.
In 1980, after an absence of almost 50 years, Welch returned to the New York
stage to participate in Black Broadway, a vaudeville-style song-and-dance
cavalcade featuring the stars of musicals of the Harlem Renaissance. In
1985, she won rave reviews and a nomination for a Laurence Olivier award for
her performance in the revue Jerome Goes to Hollywood, a celebration of
Jerome Kern, at the Donmar Warehouse. That year she took part in Jerome
Kern: a centennial celebration in Los Angeles.
She received more praise from the critics, as well as a Tony nomination,
when the renamed Jerome Kern Goes to Hollywood transferred to Broadway in
1986. Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times: "We must write letters to our
Congressmen demanding that Elisabeth Welch be detained in the United States
forthwith as a national resource too rare and precious for export."
Also in 1986, Welch opened a successful season of her one-woman show at New
York's Lucille Lortel Theatre, for which she received an Obie Award and a
special award from the Outer Critics' Circle "for making old song favourites
sound young, fresh and vital".
In 1985 she took part in her second Royal Variety Performance and was the
subject of This is Your Life. Two years later a documentary film about her
was made for Channel 4 - Keeping Love Alive, described as a "self-portrait
in words and songs".
She made her final professional appearance in 1996, in the Channel 4
documentary Black Divas, singing "Stormy Weather" publicly for the last
time. By the time she made this appearance, Welch had decided to call it a
day and, looking back on her long and illustrious career, she said:
I always intended to return to social work. People just don't understand
that I had no star that I looked for or followed. My whole life has been -
an event!
Stephen Bourne