She is survived by her mother, two sisters and brother.Laura Branigan became an overnight sensation with the release of 1982's "Gloria." Her throbbing adaptation of Umberto Tozzi's Italian hit not only reached No. Branigan's renditions of such Joplin favourites as Piece Of My Heart and Me And Bobby McGee were well-received.īranigan's final releases were a contemporary dance version of Abba's The Winner Takes It All and an album of remixed hits issued in South Africa, where she had a particularly loyal fan base. Branigan returned to the stage in New York in 2002 in Love, Janis, a musical and biographical tribute to Janis Joplin. In 1996 she temporarily retired following the death from cancer of her lawyer husband. Branigan performed three times at Chile's Vina del Mar song festival and appeared on the Sunday Night at the London Palladium television show in 1987, singing Shattered Glass, a less successful single produced by Kylie Minogue's then production team, Stock, Aitken and Waterman.īy the 1990s Branigan's strident style was out of fashion, although a 1995 CD release of the Best Of Branigan drew qualified praise from a British reviewer who wrote of her "highly appealing belter of a voice with distinctly epic and sometimes even moving qualities". In the 1990s she sang with David Hasselhoff on I Believe, a song for the soundtrack of Baywatch.ĭuring the 1980s she toured widely in Europe, Asia, Latin America, Australia and South Africa. She was heard on the soundtracks of Flashdance (1983) singing Imagination, Ghostbusters (1984), where she sang Hot Night, and Coming To America (1988). The song had already been a British and European hit for another anthemic singer, Jennifer Rush, and it was revived again by Celine Dion in 1994.īranigan was popular with film producers. The 1985 album Hold Me included I Found Someone, another Bolton song that was later to be a hit for Cher.īranigan's final hit came in 1988 with a high velocity version of The Power Of Love. In Germany, Branigan's version outsold Raffaele Riefole's original Italian language version.īranigan's later hits included The Lucky One (1985), from the television drama An Uncommon Love, and Spanish Eddie (1986).
It was the title song of her third album, and a top 10 hit in both the US and Britain. In 1984, Branigan recorded Self Control, a translation by Steve Piccolo of another European hit composed by Bigazzi. Her popularity continued in 1983 with the hits Solitaire (co-written with Diane Warren) and How Am I Supposed To Live Without You, composed by the then unknown Michael Bolton. 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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