Elly Stone

Elly Stone (May 30, 1927 – June 11, 2020) was an American actress and singer born in Brooklyn, New York, who became widely recognized for her interpretations of the songs of Jacques Brel. She attended the High School of Music & Art in Manhattan before launching a career in the 1950s that took her through an unusually varied range of performance settings, including a carnival and a burlesque show. In 1957, she performed at Carnegie Hall as part of a Folk Jamboree alongside Sonny Terry and Earl Robinson, and returned to the same venue in 1958 to perform with musical satirist Tom Lehrer.

Stone made her Broadway debut in 1962 as the understudy to Barbra Streisand in I Can Get It for You Wholesale. Six years later, she became one of the principal performers in the original off-Broadway production of Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, a revue co-written by her husband, Eric Blau. She remained with that production for two years, and in 1970 appeared alongside Brel himself in a French television special. Stone then starred in the 1972 Broadway incarnation of the revue, extending a stage association with the material that had begun off-Broadway. In 1975, she appeared in the motion picture adaptation of Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, produced by the American Film Theatre.

Beyond the Brel productions, Stone worked as a cabaret and concert headliner throughout her career. In 1980, she performed at Carnegie Hall in a concert marking her twenty-fifth anniversary in the entertainment industry. In 2006, she contributed to an off-Broadway revival of the Jacques Brel revue, which incorporated previously unseen English-language translations of Brel's music by Eric Blau.

Stone's recording output included the original cast and soundtrack albums from the Jacques Brel productions, a solo album released on Columbia Records, a collection of Jewish folk songs on the Tikva label on which she sang and played guitar, and a late-1970s album titled The Spirit of 76 on Eebee Records. In her later decades, she became an advocate for psychotherapy as a treatment for anxiety. Stone died of complications from endometrial cancer while living with her son Matthew Blau in Ecuador.