Annie Ross born 25 July 1930

Annabelle Allan Short (25 July 1930 – 21 July 2020), known professionally as Annie Ross, was a British-American singer and actress, best known as a member of the jazz vocal trio Lambert, Hendricks & Ross.

Annie Ross was born Annabelle Macauley Allan Short in Mitcham, a town in Surrey, England, into a theatrical family. Her parents, Jack and Mary Short (nee Allen), were a Scottish vaudeville team; she claimed that her mother gave birth to her immediately after finishing a performance at a London music hall.

When she was 3 she was sent to Los Angeles to live with an aunt, the singer and actress Ella Logan. She made her movie debut in 1938 in an “Our Gang” comedy short and graduated to feature films in 1943, playing Judy Garland’s younger sister in “Presenting Lily Mars.”

She later moved frequently — first to New York, where she studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts; then to London, where she took the name Annie Ross and worked as a singer and actress; then to Paris, where she came under the spell of jazz, performing and recording with a number of expatriate American musicians. One of them, the drummer Kenny Clarke, became her companion and the father of her only child, Kenny Clarke Jr., who died in 2018.

                             

Ms. Ross recorded “Twisted” for the Prestige label during a brief return to New York in 1952. It became a minor hit, but she did not stick around long enough to savor its success, instead returning to Europe in 1953 to tour with Lionel Hampton’s band and then settling again in London. She went back to New York to appear on Broadway in the British revue “Cranks,” and in 1957 she joined 
forces with Mr. Hendricks and Mr. Lambert to record the album “Sing a Song of Basie,” on which they sang Mr. Hendricks’s lyrics to some of the Count Basie big band’s most celebrated recordings, using multiple overdubs to make their three voices sound like a dozen. The album was a hit, and the three vocalists decided to make their partnership permanent.

For four years, Lambert, Hendricks and Ross were a worldwide sensation, and Ms. Ross became a model for a new breed of jazz singers who could sing rapid-fire, tongue-twisting words with precision and clarity. But despite the group’s success, she quit in 1962. At the time, her departure was attributed to poor health. In later years she acknowledged that it had been fueled partly by friction with Mr. Hendricks, but mostly by her increasing dependence on heroin.

After Lambert, Hendricks and Ross finished a club date in London in May 1962, Ms. Ross stayed behind. “I kind of knew that if I came back to America I might die,” she said. The group continued with other female singers.Gradually, Ms. Ross straightened out her life.  She married an English actor, Sean Lynch, with whom she briefly ran a London nightclub, Annie’s Room. But by 1975 she had declared bankruptcy, lost her home and divorced Mr. Lynch, who died soon after in a car crash. The work had dried up as well.

With singing jobs scarce, Ms. Ross shifted her focus to acting. From the mid-’70s until she returned to the United States in 1985, she appeared frequently on the London stage, in plays like “A View From the Bridge” as well as in musical productions like “The Threepenny Opera” and “The Pirates of Penzance.” She also became a familiar face on British television. A role in the 1979 movie “Yanks” led to other film parts, including turns as a histrionic villain in “Superman III” (1983), an addled writing student in “Throw Momma From the Train” (1987) and an aging and temperamental jazz singer in Robert Altman’s “Short Cuts” (1993).

“Short Cuts” and its soundtrack album offered Ms. Ross wider exposure as a singer than she had enjoyed since her days with Lambert, Hendricks and Ross. But her singing voice was now harsh and ravaged, in stark contrast to the limber instrument for which she had once been known. She became a United States ciizen in 2001. No longer a virtuoso vocalist, she developed an act that relied primarily on her acting skills. While her contributions to jazz were not forgotten — the National Endowment for the Arts named her a Jazz Master in 2010 — she reinvented herself as an intimate and witty cabaret artist.

Ross received the ASCAP Jazz Wall of Fame award (2009), the National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Masters' Award (2010), and the MAC Award for Lifetime Achievement (2011). She performed regularly at the metropolitan Room until it closed in 2017.

Ross died at her home in New York City on 21 July 2020 from emphysema and heart disease, four days before what would have been her 90^th birthday.

(edited mainly from the New York Times)