Amru Sani

Amru Sani (16 August 1925 – 15 August 2000) was a singer, actress, and Broadway performer whose career spanned several decades and multiple countries. During her American heyday in the 1950s and 1960s, she cultivated a reputation as an exotic and commanding stage presence, capable of performing in four languages: English, French, Italian, and Spanish.

The details of Sani's origins were a matter of some ambiguity throughout her career. She claimed at various points to have been born in Panama, raised in India, and educated in Europe. A 1954 edition of the Kingston, Jamaica newspaper The Gleaner described her as a "Jamaican enchantress of song," and an earlier 1943 item in the same publication identified her as the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. M. P. Sani of St. Andrew, Jamaica, noting that she was already an established singer on the island at that time. That same 1943 notice reported that she was preparing to travel to England to join the Women's Auxiliary Air Force. Sani herself stated that she worked as an airplane mechanic in England during World War II, having been considered too young to qualify as a female pilot. She named Dinah Shore as a significant influence on her singing, citing Shore's recording "Mad About Him, Sad About Him, How Can I Be Glad Without Him Blues" as a particular favorite.

Sani's performing career began in Jamaica in the early 1940s. In 1942 she appeared alongside the Milton McPherson dance band at the Carib Theatre in Cross Roads, St. Andrew, and by 1947 she was headlining a show called Romantic Midnite Mood at Morgan's Cove nightclub in Kingston. Around 1950 she performed at the Sherry Netherland Hotel in New York City, and she subsequently traveled to Rome, where she appeared in a French musical revue that may have been Plain Feu, a production in which Maurice Chevalier also co-starred.

Her recording work in the United States included a 1956 single for the Grand Award label, backed by Enoch Light and his orchestra, featuring the tracks "I'm in the Mood for Love" and "Tabasco." The latter track was used by the McIlhenny Company to promote its Tabasco brand pepper sauce. Time magazine reviewed "I'm in the Mood for Love" in July 1956, noting that Sani opened the track with a series of racking, echoing groans before settling into a humor that, in the magazine's assessment, made everything work. She also recorded "Once Upon A Winter Time" for Parlophone Records and "Souvenir D'Italia" for a European label.

Between June and December 1956, Sani appeared on Broadway in the musical revue New Faces of 1956, the production that constitutes her verified Broadway credit alongside the earlier New Faces of 1943. The show's producer, Leonard Sillman, claimed to have discovered her in a restaurant, recounting that her appearance alone prompted him to offer her a role contingent on her ability to sing. RCA Records issued the cast album New Faces of 1956 that same year, which included one of Sani's performances from the production, and the label additionally released a single of her rendition of "Hurry" from the show. During the same period, between 1956 and 1958, Sani made multiple appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, among them the episode on which Elvis Presley made his first appearance on that program.

As a film actress, Sani appeared in the Italian production Maracatumba ... ma non è una rumba in 1949, an early entry in the Spaghetti Western genre. She later appeared in The Naked Maja in 1958 and in John Huston's The Bible: In the Beginning in 1966.