Portia Nelson

Her sonorous, crystal clear soprano voice was complemented by expert phrasing and superb taste. Besides singing the finest torch songs of Kern, Porter, Gershwin and the other greats of popular music, she would rescue neglected songs from oblivion, introducing audiences to such forgotten gems as Jerome Kern and Anne Caldwell's "Once in a Blue Moon" and Rodgers and Hart's "Nobody's Heart". Her long-time accompanist was Bart Howard, also a composer, and it was Nelson who first recorded his song "In Other Words", which became a big hit when retitled after its opening line, "Fly Me to the Moon". The actress Jane Russell, a lifelong friend, commented, "She had a high, clear voice, with such intonation and shading! Her lyrics were sung with such understanding that you felt you'd heard a poem sung."

Born Betty Mae Nelson in 1920 in Brigham City, Utah, she was called Portia by schoolfriends, after the main character in a radio soap opera, Portia Faces Life, and decided to use the name professionally. The youngest of nine children (four of whom died before she was born), she had a humble background and was raised as a Mormon.

Having difficulty finding work as a singer in California, she became secretary to the film director Andre de Toth, and when he succeeded William Dieterle as director of Young Widow (1946, ultimately credited to its third director, Edward L. Marin) she met the star Jane Russell, who enjoyed doodling at the piano between takes and later wrote,

I liked all the obscure songs with minor chord changes. Portia happened by one day, listened, and we got to talking about songs we liked. She mentioned a song I loved and when she sang it I said, "What the hell are you doing pounding a typewriter? You should be singing."

One of Nelson's songs, "It's As Simple As That", was recorded by Jo Stafford, and Russell introduced a Nelson song, "The Gilded Lily", in the film Montana Belle (made in 1948 but released in 1952), but Nelson's own break as a singer came when the actor Louis Hayward introduced Russell and Nelson to Nick Arden, who asked for their assistance in opening a small club and piano bar in Sherman Oaks, California.

With Nelson as resident vocalist, the club was a huge success, its regular customers including Johnny Mercer, Blake Edwards and Margaret Whiting, and Nelson performed there for two years before in 1950 accepting an engagement at the Blue Angel in New York, where she was to hold the record for repeat appearances. She also sang at such clubs as Cafe Society and Le Ruban Bleu, and in 1952 recorded her first acclaimed solo album, Love Songs for a Late Evening, which was followed by Autumn Leaves and Let Me Love You: the songs of Bart Howard.

She was featured in the Broadway musical The Golden Apple (1954) and, when Goddard Lieberson, the legendary record producer, decided in the mid-Fifties to develop a catalogue of great show scores never before recorded, he signed Nelson to star in several of them, and her versions of "Falling in Love with Love" (The Boys from Syracuse), "Yesterdays" (Roberta) and "Glad to be Unhappy" (On Your Toes) are among the highlights. The New Yorker reviewer Rogers Whitaker wrote of her first album,

The first moment she uttered a professional sound five years ago she transformed Nick Arden's San Fernando Valley club into a beehive of excitement. One has only to hear the delicate phrasing and effortless command of melody to understand why she could immediately create such a stir.

But by the end of the decade vast changes had taken place in music, and in 1960 Nelson returned to work in Hollywood, stating,

The small voice was dying out for all sorts of reasons - rock and roll, television, the fact that the quality of music went downhill, and people wanted to hear rock singers and the noise and something they could shout along with. Being still, quiet, just went out of fashion.

In 1965 Nelson was featured as Sister Berthe in The Sound of Music and the following year again played a nun dealing with a wild spirit (Hayley Mills) in The Trouble With Angels. Her songs were recorded by Tony Bennett, Barbara Cook and Michael Feinstein, and in 1969 the material she wrote for a television special, Debbie Reynolds and the Sound of Children, included a song "Make a Rainbow", which was to become her most famous composition when sung by Marilyn Horne at the 1993 inaugural ceremony for Bill Clinton.

For many years Nelson played the nanny Mrs Gurney on the television soap opera All My Children, and for the last two decades she pursued careers as an author, painter and photographer from her home in New York. She made her final record album, This Life, in 1996.