Broadway star and movie and television actress Carol Channing, 97, has died. She is best remembered as having been the star of the Broadway version of Hello, Dolly! It was a huge hit back in the late 1960s. She won a Tony award for her role. Her raspy voice was also a trademark of hers.
The actress was born in Seattle to George Channing, a newspaper editor, and his wife, Adelaide.
She grew up in San Francisco, where her parents were devout members of the Christian Science religion and her father a popular lecturer for the church.
It was her religion that first led her to the theater. Channing and her mother would stand outside venues to distribute copies of The Christian Science Monitor.
Years later Channing also found out that her father had been harboring a secret.
He was listed as "colored" on his birth certificate because of his mother, though his father was Nordic German.
Interesting fact of trivia.
Another interesting bit of trivia, which Channing would not have wanted to be reminded of, and that is she co-starred with Jackie Gleason in one of the biggest stinkers in the 1960s, Skidoo, directed by Otto Preminger. In this 1968 movie, she played the wife of retired gangster Gleason who had to deal with going back to prison and then escaping from Alcatraz, but not before interacting with a bunch of other actors who embarrassed themselves with their cameo or small roles. There are too many to mention in this movie. A few include Mickey Rooney, Groucho Marx, George Raft, Cesar Romero, Franklie Avalon, Austin Pendleton, Arnold Stang, Frank Gorshin, the list is endless. So were the critical barbs. The reviews were so bad that Preminger's estate stonewalled for years not to have the flick released on DVD, but eventually the estate gave up its squeamishness and the film is now available for future generations to enjoy this train wreck.
Now if The Oscar were ever released on DVD, I could die happy.
Who could forget Channing in that film, especially when she sang the title song?
A scene from the film:
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