Carol Channing, 'Hello, Dolly!' and 'Thoroughly Modern Millie' star, dead at 97

Carol Channing, the bubbly, platinum-blond singer-actress who collected Tony Awards and Oscar nominations alike, has died at age 97. Her publicist, B. Harlan Boll, announced that Channing died of natural causes at her home in Rancho Mirage, Calif., just after midnight on Tuesday.

“It is with extreme heartache, that I have to announce the passing of an original industry pioneer, legend and icon, Miss Carol Channing,” Boll said in a statement. “I admired her before I met her, and have loved her since the day she stepped … or fell rather … into my life. It is so very hard to see the final curtain lower on a woman who has been a daily part of my life for more than a third of it. We supported each other, cried with each other, argued with each other, but always ended up laughing with each other. Saying goodbye is one of the hardest things I have ever had to do, but I know that when I feel those uncontrollable urges to laugh at everything and/or nothing at all, it will be because she is with me, tickling my funny bone.”

Channing, who would have turned 98 on Jan. 31, was famed for her work on Broadway, with Hello, Dolly!’s Dolly Levi being Channing’s most indelible role. The actress played the musical matchmaker in some 5,000 performances on Broadway and stages almost everywhere else, reportedly missing a curtain only when felled by a stomach bug in the mid-1990s in Kalamazoo, Mich.

“If you have to miss the show, Kalamazoo is a good place to do it,” Channing recalled a friend telling her.

Born in Seattle, the irrepressible entertainer with the powerful pipes and the big smile to match her enunciation made her Broadway debut at age 19.

She appeared in her first iconic role in 1949 when she starred as flapper Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, a musical based on the popular 1920s novel. “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” was Channing’s number; Broadway was hers. “Above it all towers the blonde thatch of Miss Channing,” the New York Times said its review. “[She] has taken such a strangle-hold on the part.”

Channing’s grasp, however, did not extend to Hollywood. When the Technicolor movie version was released in 1953, it was Marilyn Monroe, not Channing, who extolled the virtues of diamonds. “I was broken-hearted when somebody else got the part,” Channing said.

Channing ended up making her major-film debut in the 1957 Ginger Rogers comedy The First Traveling Saleslady. The film featured Channing locking lips with a young Clint Eastwood, his first on-screen kiss, the story goes, but otherwise was forgettable. “All through filming … Ginger and I used to call it Death of a Saleslady,” Channing said.

It took Channing nearly a decade, but she returned to form with the 1964 Broadway premiere of Hello, Dolly! The show was a popular and critical hit, winning 10 Tonys, including Best Actress for Channing. Its title song was recorded by dozens of artists, Frank Sinatra and Louis Armstrong among them. But “Hello, Dolly!” first and foremost was Channing’s — yet another signature tune.

“When I walk into a restaurant or club where there’s an orchestra, the musicians come up with ‘Diamonds’ or ‘Dolly’ right away,” Channing said.

While Dolly played and played, Hollywood circled the project. At first, Channing downplayed her aspirations to play the widowed, middle-aged Dolly Levi on the big screen. But when 25-year-old Barbra Streisand’s casting was announced in 1967, the news was a “staggering blow,” said Charles Lowe, Channing’s then-husband and manager.

“It doesn’t hurt me anymore,” Channing herself would go on to say. “But I certainly did want to jump out the window at first.”

Channing contented herself with a Dolly-esque role as the merry widow Muzzy Van Hossmere in the 1967 Julie Andrews movie musical Thoroughly Modern Millie. Only Channing’s second film, it earned her a Golden Globe Award and an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress.

Channing followed up with Skidoo, a 1968 psychedelic comedy starring fellow noted counterculture figure Jackie Gleason, and directed by the 63-year-old Otto Preminger (Anatomy of a Murder). “Singularly bizarre,” critic Alonso Duralde wrote of the film for Movies.com. Long after its release, Preminger would not speak of the movie; Channing would say she had not seen it.

The Streisand version of Hello, Dolly! was released in 1969. And while the movie won four Oscars, and ended up as one of its year’s top box-office performers, it would go down as a too-expensive, out-of-touch misfire, a dinosaur next to New Hollywood’s Midnight Cowboy and Easy Rider. Channing didn’t exactly have the last laugh, but she did express relief.

“If I had done it, they would have blamed me,” Channing told the New York Times in 1978, “and that would have been the end of my career.”

And while Skidoo essentially was the end of Channing’s brief movie career, she indeed was not over. In 1970, she was the halftime performer at the Super Bowl; the first brand-name act to take the gig. (“We didn’t even rehearse!” she recalled in 2014.) In 1972, she was back at the game. In 1974, she starred in a retooled Broadway version of Gentleman Prefer Blondes, titled Lorelei. And in 1978 and again in 1995, she headlined revivals of Hello, Dolly!

To Channing, Dolly Levi never got old. “The audience changes it — I’m the same each time,” she said in 1996.

Whether on tour or on frequent cruises on TV’s The Love Boat, Channing stayed busy and stayed on the road. “I haven’t washed a dish in 15 years,” she said in 1985.

Channing, who was awarded a special Tony in 1968, received the Tony’s lifetime achievement award in 1995. And then she kept right on performing.

Other career highlights for the raspy-voiced star include being the first celebrity to perform during a Super Bowl halftime show in 1970, voice-over work and making numerous TV appearances (making comedic turns on The Andy Williams Show and Hollywood Squares, among others) and specials.

In 1998, Channing made unlikely headlines for a 77-year-old when she filed for divorce from Lowe, and accused him of spending money “like a ‘drunken sailor,'” abusing her physically and emotionally and performing his husbandly duties in the bedroom only twice during their more than 40 years of marriage. Lowe denied the accusations, saying Channing “wouldn’t live with me if I didn’t have sex with her.” Lowe died in 1999 at age 87 before the lawsuit — and his countersuit for defamation — were formally resolved. Channing called the marriage “lousy” in the 2012 documentary Carol Channing: Larger Than Life.

Channing was married a total of four times. Lowe was her third husband after two brief marriages in the early 1940s and early 1950s. In 2003, she wed a former junior-high classmate, Harry Kullijian, whom she’d confessed to being “in love with” in her 2002 memoir, Just Lucky, I Guess. Kullijian died in 2011 just before his 92nd birthday.

She had one son, Pulitzer Prize-nominated editorial cartoonist Chan Lowe. Born Channing Carson, Lowe was fathered by Channing’s second husband, Canadian football player Alexander Carson, but changed his last name upon her marriage to her third husband, Charles Lowe.

Channing was an ovarian cancer survivor. She also had the distinction of being on Richard Nixon’s list of enemies, perhaps due to her Democratic leanings, though she had other theories.

“Why didn’t Nixon like me?” she mused to the Austin Chronicle in 2005. “I thought maybe he didn’t like my singing because I sang ‘Hello, Lyndon [Johnson].’ The press asked Nixon, ‘Don’t you like her singing voice?’ And he said, ‘No, no, no. It’s just people who don’t know how to act in the White House, they don’t have enough manners.’ I thought, are you kidding?!”

In a 2013 interview with journalist Michael Musto, Channing chalked up her longevity to her DNA — and the power of performing.

Said Channing: “I think the love I send out to an audience is returned twofold.”

Fans are paying tribute to the star on social media.

Joal Ryan contributed to this story.

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