Carol Channing

Carol Elaine Channing was born in Seattle on Jan. 31, 1921, and grew up in San Francisco, the only child of George Channing, a newspaperman turned Christian Science lecturer, and the former Adelaide Glaser. when was 16 her mother told her that her father was part black; she kept her racial heritage a secret, she wrote, for fear that it would be bad for her career. She studied drama and dance at Bennington College. During the summer of 1940 she worked briefly at the Tamiment Playhouse, the famed incubator of talent in the Poconos, but failed to make much of an impression on Max Liebman, the playhouse’s director. She ventured to Los Angeles, where she did one-nighters and benefits before obtaining an audition with Marge Champion, who was looking for new faces for “Lend an Ear,” a satirical revue for which Ms. Champion’s husband staged the musical numbers. “Lend an Ear” played for five months in Los Angeles before opening on Broadway in December 1948. It ran for just over a year, and Anita Loos and the producers Herman Levin and Oliver Smith remembered Ms. Channing’s performance when they set out to cast Lorelei Lee in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” Ms. Channing’s first two marriages, to Theodore Naidish, a writer, and Alexander Carson, a professional football player, ended in divorce. She had a son, Channing, by her second husband; he was later adopted by her third husband, the television producer Charles Lowe, and as Chan Lowe was for many years the editorial cartoonist for The Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Ms. Channing and Mr. Lowe were married in 1956 and were for many years a partnership, with Mr. Lowe negotiating Ms. Channing’s contracts and dealing with every detail of her career. That partnership unraveled in 1998, when they separated after she accused him of mismanagement. They were estranged at the time of Mr. Lowe’s death in 1999. In 2003 Ms. Channing married Harry Kullijian, who had been her junior high school sweetheart. He died in December 2011. She is survived by her son.