Diane Langton, who has died aged 80, was a golden-voiced songbird of the British and American musical theatre, ranging from the tribal rock musical Hair in 1968 through Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar in 1972, Hugh Wheeler and Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music in 1975 – in which she stopped the show with the 11 o’clock number, The Miller’s Son, – and Cats, Chicago and Billy Elliot.
But like her fellow Cockney powerhouse Barbara Windsor, she had genuine dramatic and soap opera pedigree, appearing as the discarded mistress Miss Lucy in acres of pink tulle, knocking back Martinis, in Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth, directed by Richard Eyre at the National Theatre in 1994, and as a dynamic matriarch in Channel 4’s long-running Hollyoaks.
In that soap, she was Nana McQueen from 2007 to 2024 (with a three-year break in the middle), a colourful free spirit who had mothered three daughters from different fathers, endured an abusive relationship, and got busy with a dating app. She was also very funny as Del Boy’s baffled love interest, June Snell, in Only Fools and Horses (1985-86).
She was a belter, a reliably memorable vocal talent and presence. Utterly authentic, she never played “posh” or “sly” outside her comfort zone, which was full-on and uncompromising. No wonder she starred in three Royal Variety Shows, one of them, in 1982 at Drury Lane, devoted to the musical theatre, with Ethel Merman and Howard Keel.
One of her most interesting projects was the formation of a girl band in 1973 – before the Spice Girls – Rock Bottom, with Annabel Leventon and Gaye Brown. They toured and recorded, were raunchy and often leather-jacketed and thigh-booted, and formed the inspiration (some say “rip off”) for Howard Schuman’s Rock Follies on TV, which starred Julie Covington, Rula Lenska and Charlotte Cornwell.
She readily confessed that she lost four stone to go into the first London cast of the Marvin Hamlisch/Edward Kleban sensational Broadway musical A Chorus Line directed by Michael Bennett (the Broadway cast played the first six months at Drury Lane in 1976) and, again, she stopped the show every night with her version of What I Did for Love.
Diane was the only child of William Langton, a merchant seaman, and his wife Bridie (nee Monahan). Her father and his siblings had been evacuated from the East End of London to Coventry in the second world war, but she was born in Cranmore, Somerset and grew up in Fulham, south-west London, where she attended a Protestant secondary school (though she was a Catholic; the Protestant school was nearer home).
Starting out as a dancer with ballet companies on European tours, she had trained at the Corona Academy in Hammersmith, where her contemporaries included Francesca Annis and Richard O’Sullivan. She had been married, early, to a painter and decorator, Alan Cooper, whom she divorced, meeting her second husband, the actor Derek James, when they both featured in the national tour of Hair.
Langton’s flowering in rock musical theatre took her, in the early 1970s, to the fag end of Joan Littlewood’s career at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, where she illuminated a Ken Hill knockabout comedy, Is Your Doctor Really Necessary? (1973) and the Royal Court where she acted alongside the Rocky Horror Show writer Richard O’Brien in a terrific Sam Shepard play about the evolving rivalrous rock scene, Tooth of Crime (1974), and O’Brien’s diverting but disappointing T-Zee (1976), with a score of pastiche rock and country music.
She and Derek James were an item from the mid-1970s, having met up again in rehearsal for Superstar in 1972, marrying in 1976. She cut an impressive swathe through the Hair composer Galt McDermot’s musical version of Two Gentlemen of Verona (1973), Night Music, and A Chorus Line, and an off-Broadway sort-of-sequel to A Chorus Line, I’m Getting My Act Together and Taking it on the Road (1980), at the Apollo; as the divorcee Heather Jones she boisterously attempted a come-back as a pop star in a stalled career.
Langton was fabulous, but the show bombed. So did Windy City (1981, co-starring Dennis Waterman and Anton Rodgers), an underrated musical version by Tony Macaulay and Dick Vosburgh of the 1928 Broadway classic newspaper play The Front Page, though Langton, yet again, stormed the second act with her big song as Mollie Malloy, the archetypal “tart with a golden heart”.
She grilled her acting chops more tastily in two mildly feminist entertainments in the West End: Richard Harris’s Stepping Out (1984) at the Duke of York’s, leading a posse of amateur lady tap-dancers rehearsing a charity show, a suburban response to A Chorus Line; and a 1997 revival of Nell Dunn’s Steaming at the Piccadilly, as the glum caretaker, Violet, in a Turkish baths on the brink of closure, but not before, on ladies’ day, they all take a plunge in the buff.
Her signature show, though, was surely Terrence McNally, John Kander and Fred Ebb’s hauntingly magnificent The Rink (dismissed on Broadway by the New York Times as “turgid and sour”), a mother and daughter confrontation in the fading lights of a condemned skating rink on a desolate boardwalk in a dying resort. The mother, Anna, is the owner, her prodigal daughter, Angel, hoping to reignite memories and repair a damaged family relationship.
Langton played both roles, beautifully, in separate productions: as Angel at the Cambridge in the West End in 1988 (though the show ran only a few weeks) and as Anna at the Belgrade, Coventry, in 2004. The score contained several knockout numbers, notably the climactic ding-dong song for mother and daughter, The Apple Doesn’t Fall (Very Far from the Tree).
Apart from Hollyoaks on TV, Langton also appeared in EastEnders in 1998-99 as Bev Williams, Cindy Beale’s mother. Her films included Carry on Teacher (1959, as a schoolgirl), Confessions of a Pop Performer (1975, as Ruby Climax) and Carry on England (1976, as Private Alice Easy). More respectably, perhaps, she popped up in Peter Greenaway’s high-class – though torrid, violent and cannibalistic – The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989), playing May Fitch, the wife of a gangster (Ian Dury).
Langton had been ill for some time with kidney disease, but she continued on cheerfully and valiantly in Hollyoaks through 2024. She was predeceased by a son, Jamie, from her first marriage and is survived by Derek.
• Diane Shirley Maria Langton, actor, singer and dancer, born 31 May 1944; died 15 January 2025
