Nell Carter

Actress of startling contradictions

Nell Ruth Hardy (Nell Carter), actress and singer: born Birmingham, Alabama 13 September 1948; twice married (one daughter, two adopted sons); died Beverly Hills, California 23 January 2002.

Nell Carter first achieved fame with her Tony-winning performance in the musical revue Ain't Misbehavin' (1978), in which she stopped the show with her distinctive renditions of such songs as "Honeysuckle Rose" and "Mean to Me". She also won an Emmy in 1982 for the television version of the show, which paid tribute to songs by, and associated with, the jazz star Fats Waller.

The contradictions in Carter's personality made her a unique performer – she had an expansive figure contained in a 4ft 11in frame, and a little-girl voice that was capable of belting to the rafters. An exponent of soul and blues in the tradition of Dinah Washington and Bessie Smith, she could be as heartbreakingly plaintive as Judy Garland in a ballad such as "Mean to Me", but also evoked Rose Murphy with the mischievous sense of comedy that infused both her singing and her acting. Despite her girth, she could be light on her feet, and in the classic television special Baryshnikov on Broadway (1980), she and the great dancer shimmied and shuffled delightfully to the tune of "Honeysuckle Rose".

Later she became known to an even wider audience in the United States as the star of the television sitcom Gimme a Break! in which she played the rotund black housekeeper to the family of a white widower who was the town police chief. The show ran from 1981 to 1987, and gained Carter two Emmy nominations for her portrayal of the feisty matron who tries to be both friend and surrogate mother to the chief's three winsome daughters.

In 1985 an episode was broadcast live – the first for a situation comedy in the United States in nearly 30 years. Carter and her co-stars got through the show without a single hitch, and at the end she threw up her arms and yelled, "We did it!"

Born Nell Ruth Hardy in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1948, she was the fifth of nine children. She was only a toddler when her father was electrocuted after accidentally stepping on a live power line in the field next to their home. At the age of 15, she was raped at gunpoint, and in the same year she saw the clouds of smoke rising from the local church in which four of her friends died when a bomb planted by segregationists went off. She later said that she found escape by listening to her mother's records of Dinah Washington and B.B. King, along with her brother's Elvis Presley collection.

While still a young girl, she started singing on the gospel circuit and on a weekly radio show, The Y Teens. Later she sang in local coffee houses. Moving to New York in 1967, she studied acting at Bill Russell's School of Drama and sang in the night-clubs that still proliferated in the city.

She made her Broadway début in the short-lived musical Soon (1971; Richard Gere and Peter Allen were other unknowns in the cast). Carter had the knack of turning down hit shows in order to appear in flops:

I was in the original cast of Bubbling Brown Sugar before it came to Broadway. I left it to go into Be Kind to People Week. Instead of The Wiz I chose Miss Moffat, which closed out of town. I chose Dude, which lasted one night.

Carter also had small parts in the films Jesus Christ Superstar (1973) and Hair (1979). In the latter she was part of the singing chorus together with another future Tony winner, Melba Moore. She studied drama in London before being cast in Ain't Misbehavin', which opened in New York in 1978 and ran for four years. The New York Times critic John S. Wilson praised her "strangely shrill, penetrating voice which squeezes out startling rhythmic phrases whether she is lounging or bumping and belting".

She later revealed that the night of her greatest triumph, when she won the Tony as best supporting actress in a musical, was also the night she first tried cocaine. The rest of her career was dogged by drug and alcohol addiction, two divorces, three miscarriages and, in 1992, brain surgery to remove an aneurysm. Later she learned she was diabetic and in 1997, while playing Miss Hannigan, the villainous orphanage manager in a Broadway revival of Annie, she collapsed on stage after an insulin shot proved ineffective.

In recent years Carter performed in cabaret and concerts, took guest roles in such television shows as Ally McBeal and Reba, and had parts in the films The Grass Harp (1995) and the Merchant-Ivory production The Proprietor (1996). The day before her death she had been rehearsing the part of Mama in a Long Beach, California, revival of Raisin, the musical version of Lorraine Hansberry's play A Raisin in the Sun. She was hoping that the role would return her to Broadway and launch a new career as a dramatic actress.

Tom Vallance