Adelaide Hall - British Career 1938/93

British Career 1938/93

After many years performing in the U.S.A. and Europe, Hall went to the United Kingdom in 1938 in order to take a starring role in a musical version of Edgar Wallace's The Sun Never Sets at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. She was so successful, and became so popular with British audiences, that she stayed, becoming one of the most popular singers and entertainers of the time. She lived in London from 1938 until her death.

Hall's career was an almost uninterrupted success. She made over seventy records for Decca, had her own radio series (the first black artist to have a long-term contract with the BBC), and appeared on the stage, in films, and in nightclubs (of which she owned her own, in New York, London and Paris). In the 1940s, and especially during World War II, she was hugely popular with both civilian and ENSA audiences and became one of the highest paid entertainers in the country (despite the destruction in an air raid of the London nightclub owned by her and her husband, the Florida Club). Hall has a cameo appearance as a singer in the 1940 Oscar-winning movie The Thief of Bagdad.

Adelaide Hall appears in the earliest post-war BBC telerecording; a record of her performance at RadiOlympia in October 1947.

On 29 October 1951, Adelaide appeared on the bill of the Royal Variety Performance at London's Victoria Palace Theatre held in the presence of Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret.

During an extremely long career (Adelaide entered the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's most enduring recording artist), Hall has performed with major artists such as Art Tatum Ethel Waters, Josephine Baker, Louis Armstrong, Lena Horne, Cab Calloway, Fela Sowande and Jools Holland, and has recorded as a jazz singer with Duke Ellington (with whom she made her most famous recording, "Creole Love Call" in 1927) and with Fats Waller.

She appeared in the London run of Kiss Me, Kate, starred with Lena Horne in Jamaica on Broadway in 1957, and made two jazz recordings with Humphrey Lyttelton in 1969–70. This was followed by theatre tours and concert appearances; she sang at Duke Ellington's memorial service at St Martin-in-the-Fields in 1974, and presented a one-woman show at Carnegie Hall in October 1988. She is one of the very few performers to have made two guest appearances (2 December 1972 and 13 January 1991) on the BBC's radio programme Desert Island Discs, BBC Radio 4. Her final U.S. concert appearances took place in 1992 at Carnegie Hall, in the "Cabaret Comes to Carnegie" series. She died in 1993, aged 92, at London's Charing Cross Hospital.