Elaine Delmar

Elaine Delmar, born Elaine Pamela Hutchinson on 1 September 1939 in Harpenden, Hertfordshire, is a British singer and actress whose career has spanned stage performance, film, recording, and concert work. Her father was Leslie "Jiver" Hutchinson, a jazz trumpeter born in Jamaica who relocated to the United Kingdom in the 1930s, and her mother was Phyllis Hutchinson. Delmar grew up in North London with a younger brother and sister, attending Trinity Grammar School in Wood Green, the institution now known as Woodside High School.

Music entered Delmar's life early. She began studying the piano at age six and, by thirteen, was performing on the instrument during the BBC's Children's Hour radio broadcasts. At sixteen she joined her father's band on tour, performing at venues that included US Air Force bases. She was traveling with him on tour when he died in a road accident in 1959.

Her professional singing career took shape in the mid-1950s when bassist Coleridge Goode and Lauderic Caton selected her to perform with their quartet, The Dominoes. The engagement took her to the Club Ecstase in Bad Harzburg, Germany, for a month. After that residency she departed the group and pursued a solo career, performing at clubs and undertaking overseas tours. In 2010, she appeared in concert alongside Wynton Marsalis's Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra.

Delmar's stage work began in the late 1950s with a Liverpool revival production of Finian's Rainbow. She subsequently joined the London West End cast of the Richard Rodgers musical No Strings at Her Majesty's Theatre, serving as understudy to Beverly Todd. In 1972 she was part of the original London cast of Cowardy Custard at the Mermaid Theatre, a production built around the songs of Noël Coward. In 1977 she took a starring role in Bubbling Brown Sugar at the Royalty Theatre. She later appeared in A Map of the World at the Royal National Theatre, a role in which she performed purely as an actress.

Delmar's Broadway credit came in 1986 with Jerome Kern Goes to Hollywood, a production she performed in both its London and New York runs. Her film work includes the Ken Russell picture Mahler, released in 1974, in which she was cast as the Bohemian Princess. Her recorded output includes the albums A Swinging Chick, But Beautiful, Elaine Delmar and Friends, Nobody Else But Me, and S'Wonderful.