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Natalie Cole, Grammy winning singer, has died Natalie Cole, singer and daughter of Nat King Cole, dies at 65
(about 17 hours later)
LOS ANGELES — Natalie Cole, the daughter of jazz legend Nat King Cole, who carved out her own success with R&B hits like “Our Love” and “This Will Be” before triumphantly intertwining their legacies to make his “Unforgettable” their signature hit through technological wizardry, has died. She was 65. Natalie Cole, the Grammy Award-winning singer whose top-selling albums preserved the musical legacy of her father, Nat King Cole, and established her as a powerful musical talent in her own right, died Dec. 31 at a hospital in Los Angeles. She was 65.
While Cole was a Grammy winner in her own right, she had her greatest success in 1991 when she re-recorded her father’s classic hits — with him on the track — for the album “Unforgettable ... With Love.” It became a multiplatinum smash and garnered her multiple Grammy Awards, including album of the year. Her family announced the death but did not disclose a specific cause. Ms. Cole, who suffered earlier in her life from drug addiction, had contracted hepatitis and underwent a kidney transplant in 2009.
Cole died Thursday evening at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles due to complications from ongoing health issues, her family said in a statement. Billed at one time as Natalie “Queen” Cole, Ms. Cole found her earliest musical mentor in her father, the onetime jazz pianist who became one of the best-known singers of the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s. She was attending boarding school in Massachusetts when he died of lung cancer in 1965.
“Natalie fought a fierce, courageous battle, dying how she lived ... with dignity, strength and honor. Our beloved Mother and sister will be greatly missed and remain UNFORGETTABLE in our hearts forever,” read the statement from her son Robert Yancy and sisters Timolin and Casey Cole. The following decade, Ms. Cole launched her career, making her professional recording debut in 1975 with the album “Inseparable.” She claimed the Grammy Award for best new artist, and her song “This Will Be (An Everlasting Love)” — heard years later in commercials for eHarmony, the dating website — won for best R&B vocal performance by a female singer.
“I had to hold back the tears. I know how hard she fought,” said Aretha Franklin in a statement. “She fought for so long. She was one of the greatest singers of our time.” The awards were the first in what would be a string of Grammys for Ms. Cole over the next three decades.
Other celebrities honored Cole on social media. In a tweet, actress Marlee Matlin called Cole a lovely songbird and a great actress, writing “she is now singing in heaven.” Patti LaBelle tweeted, “She will be truly missed but her light will shine forever!” Her music was marked by its versatility, combining the influences of rock, jazz and soul. In the early 1990s, after emerging from what she described as a painful and destructive drug addiction, Ms. Cole turned to the pop standards favored by her father and produced the biggest hit of her career, the album “Unforgettable: With Love” (1991).
Natalie Cole had battled drug problems and hepatitis that forced her to undergo a kidney transplant in May 2009. Cole’s older sister, Carol “Cookie” Cole, died the day she received the transplant. Their brother, Nat Kelly Cole, died in 1995. The recording featured many of Nat King Cole’s most famous songs, including “Mona Lisa,” “Too Young,” “Route 66” and “Unforgettable,” in which Ms. Cole’s voice was spliced with her father’s to make a poignant posthumous duet.
Natalie Cole was inspired by her dad at an early age and auditioned to sing with him when she was just 11 years old. She was 15 when he died of lung cancer, in 1965. “Unforgettable,” the elder singer croons, his voice drawn from a decades-old recording. “That’s what you are.”
She began as an R&B singer but later gravitated toward the smooth pop and jazz standards that her father loved. “Unforgettable,” his daughter responds in the modern-day studio. “Though near or far.”
Cole’s greatest success came with her 1991 album, “Unforgettable ... With Love,” which paid tribute to her father with reworked versions of some of his best-known songs, including “That Sunday That Summer,” ‘’Too Young” and “Mona Lisa.” Their voices merged in a verse later in the song, the accompaniment for an uncounted number of wedding dances over the years:
Her voice was spliced with her dad’s in the title cut, offering a delicate duet a quarter-century after his death. That’s why, darling, it’s incredible
The album sold some 14 million copies and won six Grammys, including album of the year as well record and song of the year for the title track duet. That someone so unforgettable
While making the album, Cole told The Associated Press in 1991, she had to “throw out every R&B lick that I had ever learned and every pop trick I had ever learned. With him, the music was in the background and the voice was in the front.” Thinks that I am
“I didn’t shed really any real tears until the album was over,” Cole said. “Then I cried a whole lot. When we started the project it was a way of reconnecting with my dad. Then when we did the last song, I had to say goodbye again.” Unforgettable too.
She was also nominated for an Emmy award in 1992 for a televised performance of her father’s songs. A runaway success, the album sold millions of copies and dominated the Grammys, winning awards including album and record of the year.
“That was really my thank you,” she told People magazine in 2006. “I owed that to him.” “I didn’t shed really any real tears until the album was over,” Ms. Cole told the Associated Press. “Then I cried a whole lot. When we started the project, it was a way of reconnecting with my dad. Then when we did the last song, I had to say goodbye again.”
Another father-daughter duet, “When I Fall in Love,” won a 1996 Grammy for best pop collaboration with vocals, and a follow-up album, “Still Unforgettable,” won for best traditional pop vocal album of 2008. The album brought her far from the early years of her career when she shied away from her father’s style of music, writing in a memoir that she “never wanted to sing like him, sound like him, or do his music. After a while, it became kind of an obsession not to do it, to do anything but, just because that’s what everybody wanted to hear.”
Cole made her recording debut in 1975 with “Inseparable.” The music industry welcomed her with two Grammy awards in 1976 — one for best new artist and one for best female R&B vocal performance for her buoyant hit “This Will Be (An Everlasting Love).” Ms. Cole received Grammy Awards in 1993 for “Take a Look” and in 1996 for “When I Fall in Love,” another posthumous duet with her father. Her final Grammy Award came in 2008 for “Still Unforgettable,” selected as the best traditional pop vocal album.
She also worked as an actress, with appearances on TV’s “Touched by an Angel” and “Grey’s Anatomy.” Reviewing her work in the New York Times, the critic Stephen Holden described her as “a polished pop-jazz stylist of conservative temperament who is a hybrid of her father, Ella Fitzgerald and the young Aretha Franklin.”
But she was happiest touring and performing live. “As a singer,” he wrote, “she has accomplished exactly the kind of fusion her father might have achieved had he been a little younger and lived a little longer.”
“I still love recording and still love the stage,” she said on her website in 2008, “but like my dad, I have the most fun when I am in front of that glorious orchestra or that kick-butt big band.” Stephanie Natalie Maria Cole was born in Los Angeles on Feb. 6, 1950, and grew up in Hancock Park, an affluent neighborhood of that city. Her mother, Maria Cole, was a singer who had performed with the Duke Ellington Orchestra.
Cole was born in 1950 to Nat “King” Cole and his wife, Maria Ellington Cole, a onetime vocalist with Duke Ellington who was no relation to the great bandleader. Ms. Cole recalled her father as “sweet, kind, and good-hearted” but frequently absent because of his performing career. He introduced his children to performers including Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra, known to the kids as Auntie Ella and Uncle Frank.
Her father was already a recording star, and he rose to greater heights in the 1950s and early ‘60s. He toured worldwide, and in 1956 he became the first black entertainer to host a national TV variety show, though poor ratings and lack of sponsors killed it off the following year. He also appeared in a few movies and spoke out in favor of civil rights. “We had no idea of the magnitude of the personalities around us,” she wrote in her memoir, “Angel on My Shoulder” (2000), co-authored with Digby Diehl.
Natalie Cole grew up in Los Angeles’ posh Hancock Park neighborhood, where her parents had settled in 1948 despite animosity from some white residents about having the black singer as a neighbor. When told by residents who said they didn’t want “undesirable people” in the area, the singer said, “Neither do I, and if I see (any), I’ll be the first to complain.” Ms. Cole learned to sing using a tape recorder, a gift from her father. When he heard her sing a Fitzgerald number, he was said to have exclaimed, “By gosh, you’ve got it!” Ms. Cole said she learned R&B on her own — her father “didn’t like that kind of stuff,” she once told The Washington Post in an interview.
The family eventually included five children. She received a bachelor’s degree in child psychology from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1972, but many of her early jobs were in music. She started out singing in clubs where, on at least one occasion, she was advertised on the marquee as her father’s daughter.
Natalie Cole started singing seriously in college, performing in small clubs. But her own talent also was quickly recognized, and she gradually progressed to more prestigious engagements. In 1974, Ms. Cole was signed to Capitol Records, her father’s recording label. After the success of “Inseparable,” she collected a 1976 Grammy for the song “Sophisticated Lady (She’s a Different Lady).”
But in her 2000 autobiography, “Angel on My Shoulder,” Cole discussed how she had battled heroin, crack cocaine and alcohol addiction for many years. She spent six months in rehab in 1983. At the same time, she lived a tumultuous personal life, with arrests, she wrote in her memoir, for offenses including drug possession, counterfeiting checks and shoplifting.
When she announced in 2008 that she had been diagnosed with hepatitis C, a liver disease spread through contact with infected blood, she blamed her past intravenous drug use. “I lived a schizophrenic existence,” she wrote, “felon by day, singer by night.”
She criticized the Recording Academy for giving five Grammys to drug user Amy Winehouse in 2008. Ms. Cole said that as her success increased, her drug problem worsened. While undergoing rehabilitation, she said that she confronted her grief over the loss of her father. In time, she rebounded, releasing the albums “Dangerous” (1985), “Everlasting” (1987) and “Good to Be Back” (1989) before “Unforgettable: With Love.” Her most recent album was “Natalie Cole En Español” (2013).
“I’m an ex-drug addict and I don’t take that kind of stuff lightly,” Cole explained at the 2009 Grammy Awards. Hepatitis C “stayed in my body for 25 years and it could still happen to this young woman or other addicts who are fooling around with drugs, especially needles.” Ms. Cole appeared on television, including on holiday specials such as the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, Christmas programs and Dick Clark’s New Year’s Eve celebration, and on shows including “Touched by an Angel,” “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.”
Cole received chemotherapy to treat the hepatitis and “within four months, I had kidney failure,” she told CNN’s Larry King in 2009. She needed dialysis three times a week until she received a donor kidney on May 18, 2009. The organ procurement agency One Legacy facilitated the donation from a family that had requested that their donor’s organ go to Cole if it was a match. Besides her earlier memoir, her books included “Love Brought Me Back: A Journey of Loss and Gain” (2010), written with David Ritz, an account of her renal disease and wait for an organ donor.
Cole toured through much of her illness, often receiving dialysis at hospitals around the globe. Ms. Cole was married to Marvin J. Yancy, her producer for years, and was separated from him when he died in 1985. Her later marriages to André Fischer, also a musician and producer, and to Kenneth Dupree, a pastor, ended in divorce. Survivors include a son from her first marriage, Robert Yancy; and two sisters.
“I think that I am a walking testimony to you can have scars,” she told People magazine. “You can go through turbulent times and still have victory in your life.” Ms. Cole said that she regarded the songs on “Unforgettable: With Love” as “a gift from my father.”
___ “The best gift,” she told Jet magazine in 1992. “In a way, I’m finally free.”
Fekadu reported from New York.
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