Obituary: Dorothy Loudon

Big-personality actor with a voice to match

If a single epitaph could encompass the Broadway star Dorothy Loudon, it would be "She had too much talent." Though shy offstage, the onstage Loudon, who has died of cancer aged 70, often seemed to wrestle with her own restless, comic invention.

Rarely was this talent harnessed to greater effect than in her Tony award-winning characterisation of the evil orphanage warden Miss Hannigan in the Broadway musical, Annie. Her trademark was a vertical cloud of blonde hair that hung over her huge blue eyes, teetering nervously with the actor's every tic.

Where many big-personality singers slow down the final chorus of a song for rhetorical emphasis, Loudon put her vocal accelerator to the floor. At one Carnegie Hall gala, dedicated to Stephen Sondheim, she took the stage to sing the composer's famous torch song, Losing My Mind, interpreting its title quite literally.

What is normally an expression of wistful obsession became a mad scene, at turns both comic and shocking, worthy of grand opera one moment and operatic parody the next. Almost until the end of her life, she had the voice and physicality to make such moments possible.

Even when she did not - such as in Over & Over, the 1999 Kander & Ebb musical version of Thornton Wilder's The Skin Of Our Teeth - her more restrained showmanship was such that her songs were kept in the show, even though the direction rendered her role less than relevant.

A native of Boston, Loudon precociously learned some 1,500 songs at an early age, and played piano at a Boston department store. She attended both Syracuse University and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and initially established herself in New York cabaret, and later on television.

The antecedents for her powerhouse cocktail of singing and comedy were Betty Hutton and Carol Burnett. In fact, her primary TV success was replacing Burnett as a regular on The Garry Moore Show, though she claimed never to be comfortable on television. "I belong in the theatre," she said in 1977. "I have to work off the instant reactions of the audience."

In her later years, she tamed her talent triumphantly in cameo film appearances, as an unconvincing scam artist in Garbo Talks (1984) and then as a beauty queen-turned-society matron in Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil (1997) who arrives at a well-heeled Christmas party carrying a loaded gun.

However short, both roles were vintage Loudon. In Garbo Talks, she inhabited a cluttered, cat-infested New York apartment, and created an indelible portrait of crumbling composure. Her Midnight role projected a heightened sense of danger for its uneasy sense of levity.

When she was offered Annie by director Mike Nichols, she had not worked as an actor in two years. In a sense, her Miss Hannigan portrayal created a template for actors of similarly extravagant, but underused, talent. Ironically, one of her best replacements over the show's multi-year run was the long out-of-work Betty Hutton. Similarly, Angela Lansbury created a template for Loudon in the role of the murderous Mrs Lovett in Sweeney Todd, which was one of her big successes.

Elsewhere, however, her Broadway career consisted of good work in bad (or at least unsuccessful) shows. Of her 13 Broadway shows, only three - Annie (1977), Sweeney Todd (1979) and Noises Off (1983) - ran for over a year. Two of the shows - Nowhere To Go But Up (1962) and The Fig Leaves Are Falling (1969) - ran for less than a week, and the much-anticipated Annie sequel (1990) failed so decisively in its pre-Broadway run that its creators compared it to a sinking oil tanker.

The most lamented flop in her career was Ballroom (1978), an extravagant Michael Bennett-directed confection that garnered Loudon a Tony nomination.

Her most intriguing might-have-been was her role of Carlotta Vance in the Tony-nominated revival of Dinner At Eight, which had a limited run at Lincoln Center in the 2002/2003 holiday season. After a week of previews, Loudon was replaced, too ill to continue. Her husband, Norman Paris, died in 1977; two stepchildren survive her.

· Dorothy Loudon, actor and singer, born September 17 1933; died November 15 2003

David Stearns

The GuardianTramp

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