Dame Cleo Laine, Lady Dankworth was an English singer and actress known for her scat singing. She was the wife of jazz composer and musician Sir John Dankworth and the mother of bassist Alec Dankworth and singer Jacqui Dankworth. Laine was born Clementine Dinah Hitching on 28 October 1927, in Southall, Middlesex. Her father, Alexander Sylvan Campbell, was a Jamaican veteran of the First World War who worked as a building labourer and regularly busked. Her mother, Minnie Hitching, was an English farmer’s daughter from Swindon, Wiltshire, who was disowned by her parents as they disapproved of her interracial relationship.
The family moved constantly, but most of Laine’s childhood was spent in Southall. It was not until 1953, when she was 26 and applying for a passport for a forthcoming tour of Germany, that Laine found out her real birth name, owing to her parents not being married at the time and her mother registering her under her own name (Hitching). Laine attended the Board school on Featherstone Road, Southall (later known as Featherstone Primary School), and was sent by her mother for singing and dancing lessons at an early age. She went on to attend Mellow Lane Senior School in Hayes before going to work as an apprentice hairdresser, a hat-trimmer, a librarian, and in a pawnbroker’s shop.
Laine auditioned successfully at the age of 24 for John Dankworth’s small group, the Johnny Dankworth Seven. Laine later played with his big bands, Johnny Dankworth & His Orchestra as well as Johnny Dankworth & His New Radio Orchestra, with which she performed until 1958. Dankworth and Laine married that year. She played the lead in Barry Reckord’s Flesh to a Tiger at London’s Royal Court Theatre, home of the new wave of playwrights of the 1950s such as John Osborne and Harold Pinter. The same year, she played the title role in The Barren One, Sylvia Wynter’s adaptation of Federico García Lorca’s Yerma. This led to other stage performances, such as the musical Valmouth in 1959, the play A Time to Laugh (with Robert Morley and Ruth Gordon) in 1962, Boots With Strawberry Jam (with John Neville) in 1968, and eventually to her role as Julie in Wendy Toye’s production of Show Boat at the Adelphi Theatre in London in 1971. Show Boat had its longest run to date from that London season with 910 performances staged.
During this period, Laine had two major recording successes. “You’ll Answer to Me” reached the British Top 10 while Laine was “prima donna” in the 1961 Edinburgh Festival production of Kurt Weill’s opera/ballet The Seven Deadly Sins, directed and choreographed by Kenneth MacMillan. In 1964, her Shakespeare and All that Jazz album with Dankworth was well received. Dankworth and Laine founded the Stables theatre in 1970, in what was the old stables block in the grounds of their home. It eventually hosted over 350 concerts per year.
Laine’s international activities began in 1972, with a successful first tour of Australia, where she released six top-100 albums throughout the 1970s. Shortly afterwards, her career in the United States was launched with a concert at New York’s Lincoln Center, followed in 1973 by the first of her many Carnegie Hall appearances. Coast-to-coast tours of the U.S. and Canada soon followed, and with them a succession of record albums and television appearances, including on The Muppet Show in 1977. This led, after several nominations, to her first Grammy award, in recognition of the live recording of her 1983 Carnegie concert. She kept touring into the 21st century, including in Australia in 2005. She performed live in the UK as late as 2018.
Laine’s relationship with musical theatre started in Britain and continued in the United States with starring performances in Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music and Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow. In 1980 she starred in Colette, a musical by Dankworth. The show began at the Stables theatre, Wavendon, in 1979 and transferred to the Comedy Theatre, London, in September 1980. In 1985 she originated the role of Princess Puffer in the Broadway musical The Mystery of Edwin Drood, for which she received a Tony nomination. In 1989, she received the Los Angeles critics’ acclaim for her portrayal of the Witch in Sondheim’s Into the Woods. In May 1992, Laine appeared with Frank Sinatra for a week of concerts at the Royal Albert Hall in London. Derek Jewell of the Sunday Times dubbed her “quite simply the best singer in the world.” Laine died at her home in Wavendon on 24 July 2025 at the age of 97.
