Marion Montgomery

Born Marian Maud Runnells (she later changed the spelling of Marian to Marion) in Natchez, Mississippi, she began her career in Atlanta working clubs, and then in Chicago, where singer Peggy Lee heard her on an audition tape and suggested she should be signed up by Capitol Records, releasing three albums for them in the early and mid-1960s. During this early part of her career, she became Marian Montgomery, having previously gone by the nickname of Pepe. In 1963, she released the original version of the song "That's Life", made famous after its 1966 release by Frank Sinatra.

In 1965, she came to Britain to play a season with John Dankworth, and met and married English pianist and musical director Laurie Holloway, thus beginning a long and productive association in which they both became well known to British jazz, cabaret and television audiences.[2] She numbered amongst her admirers Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra and British chat show host Michael Parkinson, on whose show she became resident singer in the 1970s. In 1976, she sang in a comedy musical sketch with Morecambe & Wise.[3] She also famously collaborated with composer and conductor Richard Rodney Bennett for a series of concerts and albums in the 1980s and early 1990s.[4]

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, her recording of the song "Maybe the Morning" (contained on her 1972 album Marion in the Morning) was used by Radio Luxembourg each evening to close the station, and again as the final song to be heard on the station when it closed in 1992. Her final studio recording was That Lady from Natchez, released in 1999. She continued to perform until just before her death, including a sell-out three week season at London's "Pizza on the Park" in April 2002.

She died in Bray, Berkshire, England, aged 67, in July 2002 after a 10-year battle with lung cancer, which she always blamed on passive smoking from working in nightclubs, though she herself had never smoked.

• BBC obituary
• Jazz Review Pictorial - Marion in performance