Howard Keel loses fight with cancer

Howard Keel, the broad-shouldered baritone who romanced his way through a series of glittering MGM musicals such as Showboat, Kiss Me Kate and Annie Get Your Gun and later revived his career on TV soap Dallas, has died of colon cancer.

Keel, 85, died yesterday at his home in Palm Desert, California, according to his son, Gunnar.

The musical star featured in Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals in New York and London before being signed to an MGM contract after the Second World War. He became a star with his first MGM film, playing Frank Butler to Betty Hutton’s Annie Oakley in Annie Get Your Gun.

Keel’s size and lusty voice made him an ideal leading man for such stars as Esther Williams, Ann Blyth, Kathryn Grayson and Doris Day.

His own favourite film was the exuberant Seven Brides For Seven Brothers.

“It was a fine cast and lots of fun to make,” Keel remarked in 1993, “but they did the damn thing on the cheap. The backdrops had holes in them, and it was shot on the worst film stock. … As it turned out, the miracle worker was George Folsey, the cinematographer. He took that junk and made it look like a Grandma Moses painting.”

When film studios went into a slump, MGM’s musical factory was disbanded, but Keel kept busy on the road in surefire attractions including Man Of La Mancha, South Pacific, Annie Get Your Gun and Seven Brides For Seven Brothers.

He was in his early 60s and thought to be nearing the end of his career when he suddenly became a star in Dallas, which from its start in 1978, had become the hottest series in television. Jim Davis, who had played the role of Jock Ewing, died in 1981, and the producers needed another strong presence to stand up to the nefarious JR Ewing Jr (Larry Hagman). They chose Keel.

As Clayton Farlow, husband of “Miss Ellie” Ewing (Barbara Bel Geddes), Keel remained with Dallas until it folded in 1991.

Keel was born Harold Clifford Leek in Gillespie, Illinois. His father, once a naval captain, became a coal miner. During drunken rages, he beat his children and his mother, a strict Methodist, forbade her two sons from having any entertainment.

“I had a terrible, rotten childhood,” Keel commented in 1995. “My father made away with himself when I was 11. I had no guidance and Mom was six feet tall, bucktoothed and very tough. I was mean and rebellious and had a terrible, bitter temper.

“I got a job as an auto mechanic, and I would have stayed in that narrow kind of life if I hadn’t discovered art. Music changed me completely.”

When he was 20 and living in Los Angeles, Keel was befriended by a cultured woman who took him to a Hollywood Bowl concert featuring famous baritone Lawrence Tibbett. Keel was inspired, and started taking vocal lessons. His first semi-professional opportunity came as a singing waiter at the Paris Inn Restaurant in downtown Los Angeles at €13 a week and two meals a day.

He sang in recitals and opera programmes and was summoned to an audition with Oscar Hammerstein II, who was looking for young singers to play Curly in the growing number of touring Oklahoma! Companies.

Hammerstein liked him, and soon, under his new name Howard Keel, he was singing Oh, What a Beautiful Morning in New York eight times a week. He sometimes replaced John Raitt in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s other hit, Carousel, which he played for 18 months in London.