There are few musical theatre careers that divide as sharply into two parts as did that of Barbara Cook, who has died aged 89. She was a fine lyrical soprano on Broadway in the 1950s and 60s, only to succumb to alcoholism, depression and obesity in the 70s, before returning in triumph as the pre-eminent cabaret singer of the late 20th century, albeit one whose status was cultish rather than flagrantly popular.
Montserrat Caballé and Constance Shacklock had more lung power, but Cook won hands down in the grace, charm and fluency stakes. You might go to Frank Sinatra for definitive recordings of Cole Porter, or to Ella Fitzgerald for George Gershwin, but for almost everyone else – Stephen Sondheim, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Rodgers and Hart, Lerner and Loewe, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Yip Harburg and Harold Arlen, Arthur Schwartz, Leonard Bernstein – you can never do better than Cook.
She was not a roustabout, knock’em dead performer such as Elaine Stritch or Judy Garland (though the latter was a great influence); she quietly inhabited the centre of every song she sang and delivered it with flawless beauty, crystalline articulation and supreme musical intelligence. One critic, Alastair Macaulay, even claimed that Cook, in her second manifestation, was the greatest singer in the world, doubting that anyone since Maria Callas has matched her sense of musical architecture in the shaping of songs.
She won a Tony award for her performance as a prim librarian in The Music Man (1957), the show that also beat West Side Story to the best musical Tony, sandwiched between broadsides of critical acclaim, if not public adulation, in Bernstein’s Candide (1956) – in the coloratura aria Glitter and Be Gay, a spoof of Gounod’s jewel song in Faust, she was herself incredulous that she managed, eight times a week, for 74 performances, four E flats over high C, six D flats, 16 B flats and 21 high Cs – and in She Loves Me (1963), by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, a delightful but unsentimental romantic comedy of two letter writers at cross purposes in a Budapest parfumerie; one of the songs, Ice Cream, was her signature tune in later life.
That later life, a reinvention she called it, was thanks in large part to her piano accompanist of 30 years, Wally Harper (he died in 2004), who helped plan her programme, bolstered her confidence and launched her comeback at their 1975 concert in Carnegie Hall, New York. As she confessed in a remarkably candid memoir, Then & Now (2016), she had hit rock bottom, stealing packaged meat from supermarkets, until she stopped drinking altogether in 1977 and started again in small clubs before reaching the Carnegie and the Café Carlyle on East 76th Street.
Thereafter her loyal legion of fans would pack out Lincoln Center in New York, or the Albert Hall and the Coliseum in London, to celebrate her 70th, then her 80th birthdays; in 1985, she recorded a superb concert performance of Sondheim’s Follies alongside Lee Remick, George Hearn and Mandy Patinkin, forging a deep collaborative friendship with the composer. As the critic Stephen Holden noted on many occasions, her voice deepened and darkened, and extended its emotional range, during this long Indian summer. She became the prime exponent of the great American songbook.
Cook was born in Atlanta, Georgia, the first of two daughters of Charles Bunyan Cook, a travelling salesman in hats, and his wife, Nellie (nee Harwell), a telephone operator with Southern Bell. She blamed herself, she said, for the disappearance of her father (her parents subsequently divorced) when she was six and the death of her sister from pneumonia aged three. Barbara was brought up by her mother and they slept in the same bed every night. After leaving high school, she worked as a secretary. When her mother took her to Manhattan for a fortnight in 1948, she decided to stay, hooked up with a boyfriend, took a job with Shell Oil and worked around small cabaret clubs. She did a revue in Boston and appeared at the Blue Angel club, New York, in 1950.
She made a Broadway debut, and a first impression, in Flahooley (1951), lyrics by Harburg, music by Sammy Fain, which closed after 40 performances and became a cult cause for buffs, partly because Yma Sumac, the freakish Peruvian chanteuse, was in the cast, roaming freely over four octaves, and partly because the show itself mixed a plea for liberalism with puppets and whey-faced whimsy. The talent that flared in Candide and The Music Man was more focused in Plain and Fancy (1955), in which she played an innocent Amish girl bumping into show business, prompting Walter Kerr to remark that she was “right off a blue and white Dutch plate, and delicious all the time”.
She scored in Broadway revivals of Oklahoma! in 1953 (and on tour), Carousel, The King and I and Showboat, and her “straight” plays included the premiere of Jules Feiffer’s Little Murders in 1967, but her career never embraced movies; when The Music Man was filmed, her role went to Shirley Jones.
Most bizarrely of all, she appeared with the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1988 in a misguided, Broadway-bound flop musical version of Stephen King’s Carrie; but she was terrific as a born again Christian mother to a 17-year-old Linzi Hateley’s Carrie, whom she tries to kill in order to save the world from her destructive powers. Cook noted that the show was one of two irreconcilable parts – mother and daughter face-off; high school menstruation psychosis – and that she, like everyone else, remained mystified by the director Terry Hands’s decision to dress it as an ancient tragedy in Greece when, she reveals in her memoir, someone had suggested it should be a musical comedy like Grease.
Cook returned to Broadway after 39 years with Sondheim on Sondheim in 2010 and picked up a Kennedy Center honour from President Barack Obama in 2011.
She met her husband, David LeGrant, in summer stock and toured with him in Oklahoma! They married in 1952 and divorced in 1965. She is survived by their son, Adam.
• Barbara Cook, actor and singer, born 25 October 1927; died 8 August 2017