RUSSELL, Anna

Anna Russell (born Anna Claudia Russell-Brown) was an English–Canadian singer and comedian. She gave many concerts in which she sang and played comic musical sketches, also playing the piano. She studied at the Royal College of Music, where her piano teacher was Marmaduke Barton. Russell's mother was Canadian, and the family returned in 1939 to Toronto, where she began to appear on local radio stations as an entertainer. It was the Canadian conductor Sir Ernest MacMillan who set her on her international career as a "musical cartoonist", when he invited her to take part in his annual burlesque Christmas Box Symphony Concert in 1944. She wrote the lyrics and music for 'Anna Russell's Little Show' (1953) and sang the role of the Witch in an animated film of the opera 'Hansel and Gretel' in 1954, also singing that role at New York City Opera the same year and with the Cosmopolitan Opera in San Francisco in 1957. She composed, wrote, and performed her own material for Columbia Records, and was the author of 'The Power of Being a Positive Stinker' (1955) and the 'Anna Russell Songbook' (1958). She received the Canadian Women's Press Club Award in 1956 as the best Canadian comedy writer of the year. Giving advice on how to be a successful singer, she quipped that although a glorious voice was important, "it helps to be an independently wealthy, politically motivated, back-stabbing bitch."