Karla Burns, black performer who blazed a trail winning an Olivier award for her Queenie in Show Boat – obituary

Karla Burns, who has died aged 66, was an American actress and mezzo-soprano who made her name belting out Queenie’s numbers in Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s 1920s musical Show Boat about a showbusiness family aboard a Mississippi floating theatre; she brought the role to Britain in 1989, becoming the first person of colour to win a Laurence Olivier Award for what one critic called her “teasing outrageous presentation of Queenie as the original Black Mama”.

The production, a joint staging between Opera North and the Royal Shakespeare Company was seen in Leeds and Stratford before reaching the Palladium Theatre in London, where it was seen by Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.

It was neither opera nor Shakespeare, but was an undoubted triumph, helped in no small part by Karla Burns’s portrayal of the riverboat cook as “a dynamo dumpling with enough personality to light up a whole fleet of show boats”, as another critic wrote of the show’s West End run.

Karla Burns, who stood 5 ft 1 in and weighed nearly 20 stone, cut an unlikely figure, sashaying across the stage with elegance and grace despite her stout figure and full-blown, throaty voice. “Ah’m comfortable with mah body,” she said, through her gap-toothed grin, in a 1991 interview with Valerie Grove. “Ah’ve always been a round wumman. My mother is a round wumman, and my sister is the roundest of all.”

Over the years she appeared in no fewer than 11 productions of Show Boat, packing in houses from Edinburgh to Egypt as well as in the US and France. Although the London producers decided against using the musical’s controversial n-word, Karla Burns was relaxed about it. “It’s just so offensive, and yet we can’t deny it’s what we were called,” she said. “I’m never offended, whether they decide to use the n-word or not. I’ve come to peace with myself.”

Karla Arnetta Burns was born in Wichita, Kansas, on Christmas Eve 1954, the youngest of four children of Ira Burns, a former nightclub pianist who settled down to work in a meat packing plant, and his wife Catherine (née Scott), who worked for the Red Cross. Her father died of kidney failure when Karla was seven.

She was raised a few blocks from the home of Hattie McDaniel, who played Queenie in the 1936 film of Show Boat, and to whom Karla paid tribute in Hi-Hat Hattie, a one-woman musical that she toured around the US from 1991 until as recently as 2018.

Her parents had a passion for gospel music and Karla recalled that on Saturday nights the family would sit around the piano singing Rock of Ages and Amazing Grace. “The singing was elemental, something I could do since coming out of the womb, rhythm kinda instilled in me,” she said. On Sundays there was Sunday school, church and afternoon concerts, for which Karla and her sister, Donna, would be elegantly dressed in white satin bows, white shoes and frilly dresses.

Their home was full of food, especially her mother’s delicious cherry cobbler, and surrounded with colourful flowers. As young Karla once explained: “My mom said, ‘Just because I live in the ghetto doesn’t mean I can’t make my place look lovely’. ” She only learnt her mother’s age when the older lady applied for a passport to see her daughter perform in the West End, accompanied by Karla’s aunt, Herlyne.

“My, those two ladies gave London a run for its money,” Karla Burns recalled. “They got the tour buses to take them where they wanted to go, and they finally discovered Marks & Spencer food was better than burgers and went home laden with it.”

Like other children from the ghetto Karla was bussed to the predominantly white Wichita West High School, where the boys mocked both her accent and the way she walked. They backed off when she took up shot-putting and volleyball. She also played the clarinet in a local band, swinging her instrument case at the school bullies who were foolish enough to quack as she passed them in the corridor.

At Wichita State University she wanted to study maths, but the quality of her singing impressed the choir director and she was instead encouraged to pursue music. She sang in Leonard Bernstein’s Mass, played Miss Peachum in Brecht’s Threepenny Opera and a servant girl in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, and took part in choral tours of Europe.

She made her professional debut while a student, though her breakthrough came in Houston Grand Opera’s 1982 staging of Show Boat, which toured to Los Angeles and San Francisco before reaching Broadway the following year earning her a Tony Award nomination; it was that production that was seen during the opening season of Cairo Opera House in 1989.

Her recording of the musical from the previous year with Teresa Stratas, Frederica von Stade and Bruce Hubbard, was chosen by Time magazine as one of the best recordings of the decade, and in 1994 she sang in a concert of highlights from the show with Sally Burgess at Edinburgh Festival Theatre.

Karla Burns was seen in other works on the borderline of musical and opera, including Porgy and Bess at the Metropolitan Opera, New York. She also appeared in The Comedy of Errors and Measure for Measure for Shakespeare in the Park in New York, as well as taking on the role of Karla the Klown on the American children’s television programme One of a Kind, though none brought her the same international acclaim as Show Boat.

Having left one ghetto Karla Burns settled in another, making her home in Harlem, New York. “I wanted to give Harlem a try, but a black person from one ghetto is not automatically accepted in another,” she told Valerie Grove. “I had to make Harlem my home, get to know the local shops and who would cash you a cheque.”

In 2007 she almost lost her voice permanently, when a swelling was discovered in her thyroid gland that required emergency surgery. Coming round she was told that she might never speak again, let alone sing. For the first few weeks she communicated using only scribbled notes, but gradually her speech recovered and a year later she was singing once more.

In later years she was fêted in Wichita, where in 2013 a Karla Burns Week was created in her honour and she gave voice lessons using an old cherry wood piano that was said to have been played by Duke Ellington. However, the Olivier Award statuette, which sat in her living room, remained this devout anglophile’s most cherished achievement.

“I knew then that I had really broken some barriers,” she said. “My sweet mother said, ‘Do you realise the amazing honour that they gave this little black girl from Kansas, my little girl, this important award?’ I’ll never forget it.”

Karla Burns, who had been in poor health for several years, was unmarried and is survived by her sister, Donna.

Karla Burns, born December 24 1954, died June 3 2021