Obituary: Julie London

IT SEEMED to young men in the middle Fifties that Julie London was the most beautiful woman who ever lived. Her face and figure were attractively proportioned to the requirements of the day, and she had a sultry voice that seemed to beckon one personally into her bedroom.

She was probably the most tasteful sex symbol of her time. But she was a shy woman who had to struggle with her fame. When it was over she backed away from it thankfully and lived as anonymously as she could with her second husband, the pianist-vocalist Bobby Troup, in Los Angeles. Julie London had a smoky voice and a good jazz sense. Her records were always intimate, with minimal accompaniment, often provided by the lone guitar of Barney Kessel with a bass player.

At one of her recording sessions the engineer left a tape recorder running whilst she was rehearsing "The Man I Love", a number that she couldn't sing in tune. The flawless guitar accompaniment emphasised her troubles and she must have tried to sing the song 20 times. Her language in between takes became worse and worse, and the image of the beautiful goddess soon went by the board as a hard-voiced harridan seemed to take her place. Eventually the song was abandoned, as it should have been after the second take. But all had been revealed. The tape eventually escaped to some of the cognoscenti where it caused much hilarity. "It's only a thimbleful of a voice, and I have to use it close to a microphone," she said. "But it's a kind of over-smoked voice, and it automatically sounds intimate."

She was born Julie Peck in Santa Rosa, California, in 1926, and moved to San Bernardino with her parents, Jack and Josephine Peck, who were a vaudeville song-and-dance team, when she was three. They had a radio show on which Julie sometimes appeared. The family moved to Los Angeles when she was 14 and she graduated there from Hollywood Professional High School. She took a job as a lift operator in a department store and sang at night with a band led by the violinist Matty Malneck. Sue Carol, a talent agent who was the wife of the actor Alan Ladd, heard her and before long Julie London was given a film contract.

Her earlier films were hardly productions from the top drawer. In 1944 she appeared in Nabonga and Jungle Girl. In 1945 she married Jack Webb, the star of the Dragnet radio and television show, who would later star in and produce the 1955 film Pete Kelly's Blues. Her next film was in 1947 when she appeared with Edward G. Robinson in The Red House. She gave up her budding film career when her daughter was born later in the year. But she returned for Task Force (1949) with Gary Cooper, then The Fat Man (1950) with Rock Hudson.

She and Webb were divorced in 1953. She then met Bobby Troup, composer of the hit song "Route 66", who revived her singing career. She had been suffering from what she described as "sagging confidence".

Her most potent film appearance was in the otherwise dreadful The Girl Can't Help It (1956), which starred Jayne Mansfield. Troup, whom she married in 1959, wrote the title song and in the film London sang the song that was to make her world famous, "Cry Me a River". The 45 single of "Cry Me a River" sold three million copies at the time, and remained her greatest hit, still much in demand when it was re- issued on compact disc many years later.

With Troup's encouragement, London's film career also revived, and she was given more substantial roles to play. She starred as an alcoholic singer in The Great Man (1956) and again with Gary Cooper and with Lee J. Cobb in Man of the West (1958). She wrote the title song for Voice in the Mirror (1958) and starred in it with Walter Matthau. In the same busy year she appeared in A Question of Adultery and in 1961 starred in The George Raft Story. In all she appeared in more than 20 films.

Her singing career burgeoned alongside her film work and in 1955, 1956 and 1957 she was voted one of Billboard's top female vocalists. By now she was an established recording star, and became known also for the highly charged pictures on her album covers. These became collectors' items. The critic Donald Clarke wrote of her first album Julie Is Her Name (1955) that "the conventionally sexist sleeve picture featuring the bare shoulders of a maturely attractive woman was refreshing at a time when pop music seemed to be dominated by anorexic or barely pubescent teenagers". Her albums regularly reached healthy positions in the LP charts of the time and she used outstanding jazz musicians like Kessel and the pianist Jimmy Rowles as her accompanists. She recorded her last album, her 32nd, Easy Does It, in 1967.

London moved to television, playing from 1974 to 1978 the nurse Dixie McCall in the serialised medical drama Emergency, which was produced by Jack Webb. Bobby Troup also had a role in the series. Retiring finally in the late Seventies, she and her husband became a very popular couple in the city of Los Angeles. They lived quietly until London had a stroke in 1996. She was completely incapacitated and Bobby Troup spent the rest of his life looking after her until he died last year.