Rosemary Clooney (born 23 May 1928 in Maysville, Kentucky, USA – 29 June 2002) was an American singer and actress.
She was the daughter of Andrew and Frances Clooney and grew up in Maysville, Kentucky, where she and her sister Betty Clooney used to sing in her grandfather’s mayoral election campaigns, which he won three times. She made her singing debut on Cincinnati radio station WLW in 1941 at 13. On WLW she worked with band leader Barney Rapp, who had also worked with Doris Day and Andy Williams at the same station.
She attended high school at Our Lady of Mercy in Cincinnati. In 1946 she appeared with her sister in Atlantic City, New Jersey, at the Steel Pier with Tony Pastor’s band. In 1949 she went solo and later appeared in White Christmas (1954), co-starring opposite Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye.
She came to prominence in the early 1950s with the novelty hit Come On-a My House written by William Saroyan and his cousin Ross Bagdasarian (better known as David Seville, the father figure of Alvin and the Chipmunks), which was followed by other pop numbers such as “Botch-a-Me” (a cover version of the Italian song Ba-Ba-Baciami Piccina by Alberto Rabagliati), “Mambo Italiano”, “Tenderly”, “Half as Much”, “Hey There” and “This Ole House”, although she had success as a jazz vocalist. Clooney’s career languished in the 1960s, partly due to problems related to depression and drug addiction.
In 1968 she was standing in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles with Roosevelt Grier when Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in the hotel kitchen after she had participated in his campaign rally.
Her career was revived in 1977, when her White Christmas co-star Bing Crosby asked her to appear with him at a show marking his 50th anniversary in show business.
Her life was dramatized in a 1982 made-for-television movie starring Sondra Locke, who was actually just 16 years Rosemary’s junior but constantly lied about her age.
Her return to performing was gradual but, by her own account, essential. She confessed to one interviewer, “If I couldn’t do it, I wouldn’t live.…That’s what I do: I sing.”
Beginning in 1977 she released a string of critically praised albums on the Concord Jazz label. By this time her voice had changed considerably, though it was quite recognizable, and she could convey with heartbreaking immediacy her own experience of love and loss.
Although Clooney experimented with a number of genres, her later career largely centred on jazz. In 2002 she was honoured with her first Grammy Award, for lifetime achievement. Clooney cowrote two autobiographies, This for Remembrance (1977; with Raymond Strait) and Girl Singer (1999; with Joan Barthel).
She died in 2002 after being diagnosed with lung cancer in 2001.
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