Anna Russell

Anna Claudia Russell-Brown, known professionally as Anna Russell, was born on 27 December 1911 in Maida Vale, London, England, and died on 18 October 2006 in Rosedale, New South Wales, Australia. An English-Canadian singer, comedian, and composer, she built an international career performing comic musical sketches and parodies, becoming particularly celebrated for her humorous deconstructions of classical and operatic repertoire.

Russell received her formal musical education at the Royal College of Music in London, where Marmaduke Barton served as her piano teacher. Her earlier schooling took place at St Felix School in Southwold, Suffolk, Harrogate College, and institutions in Brussels and Paris. Her early professional work included operatic engagements and appearances as a folk singer on BBC radio in 1931. After her father's death, her family relocated to Toronto in 1939, where she began performing on local radio. By 1940 she had established herself as a concert soloist in Canada, and in 1942 the Toronto Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire sponsored her first one-woman parodist show. Canadian conductor Sir Ernest MacMillan invited her to participate in his annual burlesque Christmas Box Symphony Concert in 1944, a turning point that launched her international profile as a self-described musical cartoonist. She made her New York City debut in her one-woman show in 1948 and subsequently toured North America, Britain, Australia, and the broader English-speaking world. She was twice married and divorced, first to John Denison and second to artist Charles Goldhamer.

During her first major successful season of 1952–53, Russell performed in 37 cities across the United States and Canada before an estimated 100,000 listeners, and her recording Anna Russell Sings? became a best seller. She wrote the lyrics and music for Anna Russell's Little Show, which she brought to Broadway in 1953. Originally from London, Ontario, Canada, she also appeared on Broadway in All by Myself in 1960. In 1963, alongside Robert Paine Grose and Joan White, she co-founded Grow Productions, Inc., which presented Lady Audley's Secret at the New York World's Fair in 1964. Additional stage work included a leading role in Noël Coward's Blithe Spirit and a production of Quality Street in 1965 at the Bucks County Playhouse in Pennsylvania. She sang the role of the Witch in a 1954 animated film of the opera Hansel and Gretel, reprising that role at New York City Opera the same year and with the Cosmopolitan Opera in San Francisco in 1957. In 1977 she played the Duchess of Crackenthorp in the Canadian Opera Company's production of Daughter of the Regiment, a role she later recreated for Tulsa Opera in a production featuring Erie Mills and Giorgio Tozzi.

Among Russell's most celebrated works were her concert performances and recordings of The Ring of the Nibelungs (An Analysis), a humorous 22-minute synopsis of Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, and her parody How to Write Your Own Gilbert and Sullivan Opera, both released on the same album. Her deadpan delivery and her habit of emphasizing the absurd within widely accepted narratives defined her comic style. In her Ring analysis, after noting that the first scene takes place in the River Rhine, she would stress the words "In it!!" and, upon observing that Gutrune is the first woman Siegfried has ever met who is not his aunt, she would pause and declare, "I'm not making this up, you know!" That phrase became the title of her 1985 autobiography. The reach of her Wagner parody extended to the cycle's 100th anniversary celebrations in 1976, when Wolfgang Wagner featured her Ring send-up at a dinner and musical soiree he hosted. Other well-known routines included "Wind Instruments I Have Known" and parodies of Lieder, French art songs, English folk songs, English music-hall songs, blues, and jazz.

Russell composed, wrote, and performed her own material for Columbia Records and served as President of the B & R Music Publishing Company. She authored The Power of Being a Positive Stinker in 1955 and the Anna Russell Songbook in 1958, and received the Canadian Women's Press Club Award in 1956 as the best Canadian comedy writer of the year. She performed at New York's Carnegie Hall and London's Royal Albert Hall, and appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show. Russell retired to Unionville, Ontario, in the late 1960s, living on a street named after her, though she continued to tour through the 1970s and 1980s, including one-woman shows at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and Carnegie Hall. In 1975 she toured rural New South Wales in the circus pantomime The Clown Who Lost His Circus, and in 1980 she played Helga ten Dorp in a production of Deathtrap at the Grand Theatre in London, Ontario. In her final years she moved to Australia, where she was cared for by Deirdre Prussak, a close friend of more than 50 years and the author of the memoir Anna in a Thousand Cities.