Barbara McNair, singer who found success in Hollywood, dies at 72By JACOB ADELMAN, Associated Press Writer
Monday, February 5, 2007
(02-05) 13:56 PST Los Angeles (AP) --
Barbara McNair, the pioneering black singer-actress who hosted her own TV variety show and starred in Hollywood with Sidney Poitier in the early 1970s, has died, her sister said Monday. She was 72.
McNair died Sunday after a battle with throat cancer in Los Angeles, sister Jacqueline Gaither said.
"She was very family oriented," Gaither said. "She was more than just a star or a famous personality. She was a person of her own."
Gaining fame in the 1960s as a nightclub singer, McNair graduated to film and television as opportunities were opening up for black women late in the decade. She made her Hollywood acting debut in 1968 in the film, "If He Hollers, Let Him Go."
She later starred with Elvis Presley in his 1969 film "Change of Habit" and as Poitier's wife in the 1970 film "They Call Me MISTER Tibbs!"
She found movie acting "a more rewarding kind of work than singing," she told The Washington Post in 1969. "When I'm working in a club, I must go from one song to another rapidly and I don't have much time to express myself emotionally. In a movie, you can concentrate on one scene at a time."
She hosted television's "The Barbara McNair Show," a syndicated musical and comedy program, from 1969 to 1972.
As a singer, one of her biggest hits was "You Could Never Love Him." She started out as a jazz singer but later branched out, adding show tunes and the Beatles'"Yesterday" to her repertoire.
During her early attempts to break into Broadway, McNair said she was thwarted by an entertainment establishment that had few opportunities for black performers.
"I went to New York and made all the rounds of the casting offices, looking for chorus work," she told The Associated Press in 1970. "It never occurred to me that they wouldn't hire me because I was a Negro ... But I found out that was true."
Even after her career had taken off, she found it difficult to navigate through the world of show business as a black woman.
"I don't want someone else's way of how I am to project myself as a black person forced on me," she told Jet magazine in 1969. "I want to do it the way that is me."
Gaither said her sister seemed headed for a career in show business from the time she was a girl in Racine, Wis.
"She sang from the time she was 5 years old in churches and then at school," Gaither told the Racine Journal Times. "We always encouraged her."
McNair went to the University of California, Los Angeles, before moving to New York City to pursue her dream of becoming an entertainer.
An engagement in 1957 at the Village Vanguard earned her the notice that would lead to her first Broadway performance in the play "The Body Beautiful" a year later. She went on to star on Broadway in the musical "No Strings" in 1963.
Reviewing a nightclub appearance in late 1965, a New York Times writer commented that the "strikingly beautiful" McNair "does not have to depend on looks alone. She is a highly knowledgeable performer who projects an aura of beauty, a warm personality and an appealing sense of fun."
As she gained notice in Hollywood in the late 1960s, she told the Post that a steamy 1968 photo spread she did for Playboy "helped my career immensely."
Also around that time, she joined a Bob Hope tour to entertain servicemen in Vietnam, saying she was thrilled to later meet men who had seen her there.
"I don't believe in war for any reason," she told the Post. "I went over there to see what war was like and to comfort the men and I was appalled."
Her career was hampered in 1972, when she was accused of drug possession after she signed for a package delivered to her dressing room. She was later cleared.
"You can spend all this time building something, and it can be destroyed in a minute," she told the Post in 1979.
McNair's television career continued into the 1980s. She appeared on such shows as "The Jeffersons," the "Redd Fox Show" and the "Gong Show."
"She had a great resume, she could have ended up conceited, but nothing ended up that way," her current husband Charles Blecka said. "She had a special quality that was infectious, that everybody loved."
McNair continued to sing professionally as long as she could, Gaither said, but the cancer that started in her throat and then spread eventually hurt her ability to perform.
"She sang until the middle of last year," Gaither told the Journal Times. "At that time she thought that would be her last. The audience enjoyed her, but she did not think she was really doing well at that time. She said that if she couldn't sing any better than that, that would be the last one."
Along with Gaither, McNair is survived by Blecka. Funeral arrangements were pending.
