This week: a cabaret star, the original 'angry young man' and a comedian to the stars

THE singer Wesla Whitfield, who has died aged 70, was an accomplished jazz and cabaret star who with her husband, the pianist Mike Greensill, recorded more than 20 albums that put fresh interpretations on the Great American Songbook.

From her 30s, Whitfield had used a wheelchair after being paralysed from the waist down in a shooting in San Francisco. She sometimes performed in the wheelchair, although for many years she sang from a chair or stool, usually after being carried on stage by her husband.

Born in Santa Maria, California, she once said that she knew by the age of two that she wanted to be a singer and initially she pursued the classical route. She learned the piano, she sang in church, and studied music at San Francisco State University before joining the San Francisco Opera chorus as a soprano.

Eventually, though, she tired of opera and began to sing some of the jazz standards in clubs and bars instead. She met Mr Greensill in the early 1980s and he soon became her pianist and arranger. Before long, they were performing across the US.

They released their first album, Until The Real Thing Comes Along, in 1987 and recorded together for the next 30 years; their most recent album, Best Thing For You - Live from the Rrazz Room, was released in November 2011.

THE actor Kenneth Haigh, who has died aged 86, became the original "angry young man" of the 1950s when he took on the role of Jimmy Porter in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court in May 1956. The play, which became a film, was at the heart of a new movement in theatre, one which sought to give a voice to a generation railing against the constraints and conventions of post-war Britain.

In some ways, Haigh resembled his most famous character. He was born in Yorkshire who, after training at the Central School of Speech and Drama, railed against the mundanity of weekly rep. Look Back in Anger was a huge success for him, though, in the UK and on Broadway, where the play received three Tony nominations and played for a year - thanks, partly, to a clever publicity stunt in which an actress posing as a member of the audience got on stage and slapped Haigh on the face.

He had other successes on stage, and some on television, notably in Man at the Top from 1970 to 1972. However, he never broke through on film - the film adaptation of Look Back in Anger went to Richard Burton. He had spent the last 15 years of his life being cared for in a home after a choking incident caused brain damage.

THE COMEDIAN Marty Allen, who has died aged 95, first found fame as half of the duo Allen and Rossi with partner Steve Rossi, who died in 2014. Allen and Rossi appeared 44 times on The Ed Sullivan Show, including the episodes where the Beatles performed and much of the world watched. Allen was also known for performing Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Lena Horne and Elvis Presley

The duo appeared regularly on The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson and The Merv Griffin Show. They also toured comedy clubs nationwide, headlined shows at major Las Vegas casinos and released a series of hit albums until their amicable breakup in 1968.

Allen then took on a series of serious roles on daytime television and made-for-TV movies, and was a regular on The Hollywood Squares and other celebrity-themed game shows.

He was born in Pittsburgh and served in Italy in the Army Air Corps in the Second World War, earning a Soldier's medal for valour.

He was married to Lorraine "Frenchy" Allen from 1960 until she died in 1976. Then in 1984 he married Blackwell, a singer-songwriter who became his performing partner in his last decades and acted as the goofy Allen's "straight man" just as Rossi did half a century earlier.

He kept making crowds laugh into his mid-90s. "It's unbelievable to be 94 years old," Marty Allen told a New York audience in 2016. "My wife says, 'What do you want for your birthday?' I told her, 'An antique.' So she framed my birth certificate."