The accompanying album, called Branigan, was equally successful and the prelude to a career in which she was to sell more than 10m records in the US alone. This brought her to the attention of Atlantic Records, which signed her to a long-term contract - and the result was Gloria. She next sought work as an actor and singer, but her breakthrough came in 1979 when she was hired as a backing singer for a European tour by Leonard Cohen. After playing the lead in a high school musical theatre production, she attended the Academy for Performing Arts in Manhattan. It was also a British top 10 hit.īranigan was born in Brewster, New York, the fourth of five children of a stockbroker and a housewife. Gloria remained in the United States top 40 for 22 weeks in 1982 and peaked at number two. It was given an arrangement in the power ballad style pioneered in America by Pat Benatar and the music video of the song showed Branigan, in the spirit of the Eighties, in black spandex trousers and knee-high boots with a single discoball spinning above her head. It was an English language version of a then recent Italian hit sung by Umberto Tozzi composed by Tozzi and Giancarlo Bigazzi. Her first and biggest hit, in 1982, was the Grammy-nominated Gloria. Although she appeared off-Broadway in a show based on Janis Joplin's life, Branigan's forte was the rock ballad, of which she was a leading female exponent in the 1980s. Laura Branigan, who has died of a brain aneurysm aged 47, was a powerful singer with a five-octave range who in an earlier generation would have graced the Broadway stage.
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