Cole made her recording debut in 1975 with Inseparable. The music industry welcomed her with two Grammy awards — one for best new artist and one for best female R&B vocal performance for her buoyant hit “This Will Be (An Everlasting Love).”
She also worked as an actress, with appearances on TV’s Touched by an Angel and Grey’s Anatomy.
But she was happiest touring and performing live.
“I still love recording and still love the stage,” she said on her website in 2008, “but like my dad, I have the most fun when I am in front of that glorious orchestra or that kick-butt big band.”
Cole was born in 1950 to Nat “King” Cole and his wife, Maria Ellington Cole, a onetime vocalist with Duke Ellington who was no relation to the great bandleader.
Her father was already a recording star, and he rose to greater heights in the 1950s and early ’60s. He toured worldwide, and in 1956 he became the first black entertainer to host a national TV variety show, though poor ratings and lack of sponsors killed it off the following year. He also appeared in a few movies and spoke out in favor of civil rights.
Natalie Cole grew up in Los Angeles’ posh Hancock Park neighborhood, where her parents had settled in 1948 despite animosity from some white residents about having the black singer as a neighbor. When told by residents didn’t want “undesirable people” in the area, the singer said, “Neither do I, and if I see (any), I’ll be the first to complain.”
The family eventually included five children.
Natalie Cole started singing seriously in college, performing in small clubs.
But in her 2000 autobiography, Angel on My Shoulder, Cole discussed how she had battled heroin, crack cocaine and alcohol addiction for many years. She spent six months in rehab in 1983.
When she announced in 2008 that she had been diagnosed with hepatitis C, a liver disease spread through contact with infected blood, she blamed her past intravenous drug use.
She criticized the Recording Academy for giving five Grammys to drug user Amy Winehouse in 2008.
“I’m an ex-drug addict and I don’t take that kind of stuff lightly,” Cole explained at the 2009 Grammy Awards. Hepatitis C “stayed in my body for 25 years and it could still happen to this young woman or other addicts who are fooling around with drugs, especially needles.”
Cole received chemotherapy to treat the hepatitis and “within four months, I had kidney failure,” she told CNN‘s Larry King in 2009. She needed dialysis three times a week until she received a donor kidney on May 18, 2009. The organ procurement agency One Legacy facilitated the donation from a family that had requested that their donor’s organ go to Cole if it was a match.
Cole toured through much of her illness, often receiving dialysis at hospitals around the globe.
“I think that I am a walking testimony to you can have scars,” she told People magazine. “You can go through turbulent times and still have victory in your life.”
Article Appeared @http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/6828859/natalie-cole-nat-king-cole-dead-at-65