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.
