Streisand, Barbra

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      in Music

      Joni James, Heartfelt Chanteuse of the 1950s, Dies at 91

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      A top-selling artist known as the “Queen of Hearts,” she had a voice tinged with longing and melancholy and was an early influence on Barbra Streisand.Joni James, a best-selling chanteuse whose records climbed the Billboard charts in the 1950s and who was an early influence on Barbra Streisand, died on Feb. 20 in West Palm Beach, Fla. She was 91. Her family announced the death, in a hospital, in an online obituary. No cause was specified.Known to her fans as the “Queen of Hearts,” Ms. James had an intimate vocal style tinged with longing and melancholy. She recorded nearly 700 songs and sold more than 100 million records — 24 going platinum and 12 gold.“I always sang from the heart,” she told The Daily News of New York in 1996. “I always sang about life and how it affected me. I’m Italian. Italians are passionate people.”Her debut single, “Why Don’t You Believe Me,” reached No. 1 on the three Billboard charts in 1952 (in those days there were separate charts for sales, radio play and jukebox play) and made her an overnight sensation.Her next showstoppers included “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” a cover of the Hank Williams hit, which helped Ms. James establish herself as one of the first pop singers to bring country into the pop mainstream.In the mid-1950s, she had four Top 10 charted hits, including “Your Cheatin’ Heart” and “Have You Heard?,” which sold more than three million records, and “How Important Can It Be?,” which sold more than four million.In May 1959, she was among the first pop singers to perform a solo concert at Carnegie Hall, where she was backed by a 100-piece orchestra and 30 singers.It was Ms. James’s recording of “Have You Heard?” that drew Ms. Streisand to her. “My favorite singer while I was growing up was Johnny Mathis,” Ms. Streisand told The New York Times in 1985. “I also listened a lot to Joni James records and sang her hit ‘Have You Heard?’ at club auditions, but I didn’t really want to sound like her.”Whether she wanted to or not, some early Streisand recordings did recall those of Ms. James, at least to the ear of the Times critic Stephen Holden, who wrote in 1991, “Without having developed a rounded vibrato, she sounded a lot like her childhood idol, Joni James, a singer with only rudimentary technique who infused early-’50s pop ballads with a waiflike plaintiveness.”There was enough of a connection between the two singers that Ms. James was invited to be part of a star-studded cast for the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award tribute to Ms. Streisand in 2001. Onstage at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, Ms. James performed one of Ms. Streisand’s signature songs, “The Way We Were,” accompanied by Marvin Hamlisch on piano.Ms. James recorded nearly 700 songs in her career and sold more than 100 million records, but she largely left the music scene in 1964. Giovanna Carmella Babbo was born in Chicago on Sept. 22, 1930. Her father, Angelo Babbo, who sang operatic arias when he was a shepherd boy in Italy, had come to America at 18. He died at 36, when Giovanna was 5. That left her mother, Mary Chereso, struggling to raise six children by herself during the Depression.Giovanna babysat and worked in a bakery to help the family and to raise money to train as a ballerina. A petite woman — she stood 5 feet tall and wore a size 4 shoe — she dreamed of going to New York and dancing with the American Ballet Theater.That didn’t happen. After graduating from high school, she toured Canada with a local dance group, then took a job as a chorus girl at the Edgewater Beach Hotel in Chicago. By then she had changed her first name, after her high school newspaper kept misspelling it. Later, when she worked as a model, her managers told her to find a new surname; Ms. Babbo promptly turned to the phone book and picked “James” at random.While she was focused on dance, singing was second nature to her. She grew up singing in the school choir and said her influences were the blues and Gregorian chants. Later, when she sang in nightclubs and entered talent contests, audiences always reacted warmly to her, but she didn’t consider herself a real singer like her idols, Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday and Doris Day.Ms. James was finally noticed by MGM Records, which signed her to a contract in 1952. Her first single had been written as “You Should Believe Me,” but she tweaked the lyrics and the title, making it “Why Don’t You Believe Me.” She paid for and organized the recording session, which included a 23-piece orchestra. The song was an instant hit and sold more than two million copies.She married Anthony Acquaviva, her manager, arranger and conductor, in 1956 at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. Mr. Acquaviva, known as Tony, oversaw sessions on which she was accompanied by strings, which helped define her lush sound.She appeared on all the major television variety shows, including those hosted by Ed Sullivan, Perry Como and Andy Williams. She was in demand around the world and became the first American to record at Abbey Road Studios in London, where she made five albums.But at the height of her fame, her husband developed diabetes, and she largely left the music scene in 1964 to care for him. She told The Los Angeles Times that this included washing one of his legs six times a day to prevent it from getting gangrene and being amputated. He died in 1986.Though she still performed occasionally while he was still living, she had stepped so far away from the limelight that the newspapers called her “The Garbo of Song.”She then met Bernard A. Schriever, a retired Air Force general who oversaw the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles. They married in 1997, and with his encouragement she eased her way back onstage, performing memorable concerts in New York at Town Hall, Carnegie Hall and Avery Fisher Hall.“I was a bent-wing sparrow,” she told The Oakland Tribune, “and he pushed me to come back.”Ms. James is survived by her son, Michael Acquaviva; her daughter, Angela Kwoka; her brothers, Angelo Babbo and Jimmy Contino; her sisters, Clara Aerostegui and Rosalie Ferina; and two grandchildren. General Schriever died in 2005.Asked by The Daily News in 2000 why she sang so many sad songs, Ms. James had a simple answer: “Because I know what they mean.” More

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      in Movies

      Joan Washington, Dialect Coach to the Stars, Dies at 74

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      She taught Barbra Streisand, Penélope Cruz and countless other performers how to sound like someone else.Joan Washington, an acclaimed dialect coach who taught Penélope Cruz to sound Greek, Jessica Chastain to sound Israeli and an entire cast of British actors to speak like Brooklyn Jews, died on Sept. 2 at her home in Avening, England. She was 74.Her husband, the actor Richard E. Grant, announced her death on Twitter. He later said the cause was lung cancer.In a career spanning four decades, Ms. Washington developed a reputation as a sort of reverse version of Henry Higgins, the elocutionist who taught Eliza Doolittle the King’s English in George Bernard Shaw’s play “Pygmalion.” She instructed actors to speak not just in national dialects but also in regional and local lilts, even historical ones.She taught actors for most of Britain’s leading national and regional theaters; if a British performer appeared onstage speaking a thick American patois — say, in Neil Simon’s “Brighton Beach Memoirs” — there was a good chance it was Ms. Washington’s handiwork.She also worked on a steady stream of films. She teamed up with Ms. Cruz for “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” (2001), Ms. Chastain for “The Debt” (2010), Kate Beckinsale for “Emma” (1996) and the British actress Thandie Newton for “W.,” Oliver Stone’s 2008 take on the life of George W. Bush, in which she played Condoleezza Rice, the former U.S. national security adviser.Jessica Chastain in a scene from “The Debt” (2010). Ms. Washington trained Ms. Chastain to sound Israeli for that movie, in which she played a secret agent.Laurie Sparham/Focus FeaturesDialect, Ms. Washington said, was not just about mimicry, about reading a script with an accent. It had to be built into the core of a performance.“A dialect coach must be there from the start,” she told the British newspaper The Independent in 1991. “Otherwise the bad habits are set; it becomes just a bandaging job. There’s enough undoing as it is.”Ms. Washington was something of a performer herself, though never onstage or onscreen. She could instantly adopt whatever dialect she was teaching, and she claimed to have mastery over 124 vowel sounds — just six shy of what Professor Higgins boasted.Though she was born and raised in Scotland, Ms. Washington employed a standard English accent when teaching Americans. She said they brought too many assumptions about what “proper” English sounds like and might be confused by her natural Scottish elocution.“The problem for Americans doing English is that they pronounce their consonants too precisely, which makes it sound rather acquired and middle class,” she said in a 1986 interview with The Sunday Telegraph. “The grander we are, the less we rely on consonants.”Ms. Washington came about her talent thorough research. Before working with actors, she had taught standard English pronunciation at the Royal College of Nursing, whose students arrived from all over Britain and the Commonwealth. Her recordings of their accents formed the basis of a vast library of tapes she kept as reference.She interviewed and recorded older Britons to capture what Liverpudlian or Geordie — an accent from Tyneside, in northeast England — might have sounded like decades ago. To show what English sounded like in the 1910s, she relied on recordings of British prisoners made by Germans during World War I.Her instructional methods were intense. She would often begin by interviewing performers to gauge what they thought a Boston Brahmin or a Warsaw Pole might sound like. She took notes, reams of them, and then handed them to the actors along with copies of her tapes.Over a series of sessions, she would tweak Rs, adjust inflections and suppress unwanted sibilants until an American actress like Emma Stone sounded like an authentic 18th-century English courtier, as she did in the 2018 film “The Favourite.”Barbra Streisand in “Yentl” (1983), the first film on which Ms. Washington worked. She taught Ms. Streisand how to speak like an Ashkenazi Jew in early-20th-century Poland.MGMMs. Washington always worked freelance, but she was most closely associated with the Royal National Theater, where she worked on more than 70 shows. Her first film was “Yentl” (1983), for which she taught the star and director, Barbra Streisand, how to speak like an Ashkenazi Jew in early-20th-century Poland.Ms. Washington had her own theories about accents and where they came from. She said that Britain’s plethora of dialects and accents, all crammed onto a medium-size island, derived from its varying geography and climate.“Cornish is harder and more nasal than Devon because it’s a windy peninsula,” she told The Sunday Telegraph. “If you’ve got the wind in your face, you’ve got to speak without giving much away.”Joan Geddie was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, on Dec. 21, 1946. Her father, John, was a doctor, and her mother, Maggie (Cook) Geddie, was a nurse.When she was 18 she moved to London to attend the Central School of Speech and Drama. After graduating, she taught speech, first at a reform school for girls and then at the Royal College of Nursing.In 1969 she married Keith Washington; they later divorced. Along with Mr. Grant, she is survived by her son, Tom Washington; her daughter, Olivia Grant; and her brother, David Geddie.While teaching, Ms. Washington also picked up side jobs as a dialect coach. In the class-conscious England of the postwar decades, millions of Britain’s expanding middle class sought to erase any trace of their proletarian origins, starting with their accents, which provided her with an abundance of work.Her clients included doctors and clergymen as well as actors — the only ones, she said, who went the opposite direction, seeking instruction on how to sound less posh.She was teaching at the Actors Center in London in 1982 when she met Mr. Grant, who had been born and raised in Swaziland (now Eswatini), in Africa, and was taking her class to sound more like a native Englishman.Mr. Grant was smitten, he later recalled, and he asked if she could give him private lessons. She said yes, at £20 an hour — about $43 in today’s dollars.“But I can only afford £12,” he replied.“All right,” she said, “but you’ll have to repay me if you ever ‘make it.’”The two married in 1986, a year before Mr. Grant made his film debut in “Withnail and I,” which overnight made him one of Britain’s most in-demand actors. He later won acclaim for his performances in movies like “Gosford Park” (2001) and “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” (2018), for which he received an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor.Ms. Washington learned she had lung cancer late last year, and the disease advanced quickly. She did have one final assignment, though: Mr. Grant had been cast to play Loco Chanelle, a drag queen, in the film version of the stage musical “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie,” and he needed help with his character’s Sheffield accent.A few days after her death, Mr. Grant posted a video on Twitter that Ms. Washington had made of him practicing for the role, with her, offscreen, giving instructions. More