Helen Reddy - 1941-2020

Helen Reddy, the Australian-born singer whose 1972 hit song “I Am Woman” became the feminist anthem of the decade and propelled her to international pop-music stardom, died on Tuesday, 29 September 2020, in Los Angeles. She was 78.

A statement from Reddy’s children, Traci and Jordan, was posted to her official fan page on Facebook on Tuesday afternoon. “It is with deep sadness that we announce the passing of our beloved mother, Helen Reddy, on the afternoon of  29 September 2020, in Los Angeles,” the statement said. “She was a wonderful Mother, Grandmother and a truly formidable woman. Our hearts are broken. But we take comfort in the knowledge that her voice will live on forever.”

Reddy had been diagnosed with dementia in 2015 and had been living in a Los Angeles nursing home for professional entertainers. Ms. Reddy suffered for decades from Addison’s disease (she had a kidney removed when she was 17) and, since at least 2015, from dementia.

“I Am Woman” reached No. 1 on the Billboard chart on 9 December 1972 - a good six months after it was released - individual call-in requests helped build radio play - and earned her the Grammy Award for best female pop vocal performance. She was the first Australian-born artist to win a Grammy and the first to make it to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

Some male observers called the song — beginning with the words “I am woman/ Hear me roar/ In numbers too big to ignore,” sung by a 5-foot-3 soprano — angry, man-hating, dangerous or all three.

“That simply underlined the many things women needed liberating from,” Dennis Harvey of Variety reflected in 2019. “Nobody called Sinatra a menace when he sang ‘My Way,’ a no less straightforward hymn to self-determination.”

Besides 'I am woman' Ms Reddy reached the top of Billboard chart with “Delta Dawn”, #1 on 15 September 1973 and “Angie Baby”, #1 on 28 December 1974. Three others songs made the Top 10: “Leave Me Alone (Ruby Red Dress)”, #3 on 17 November 1973; 'You and me against the world', #9 on 20 July 1974 and “Ain’t No Way to Treat a Lady”, #8 on 30 August 1975. More than three decades later, The Chicago Tribune declared her the “queen of ’70s pop.”

Helen Maxine Lamond Reddy was born on 25 October 1941, in Melbourne, Australia, the only child of Max Reddy, a writer, producer and actor, and Stella (Lamond) Reddy, an actress whose stage name was Stella Campbell. Her father was in New Guinea, serving in the Australian Army, when she was born.

The Reddys performed on the Australian vaudeville circuit, and Helen began joining them onstage when she was 4.

At 12, she rebelled by quitting show business and going to live with an aunt while her parents toured. But her financial situation - after an early marriage, parenthood and divorce -  persuaded her to return.

Ms. Reddy had a solid reputation in Australian television and radio when she won a 1966 talent contest sponsored by “Bandstand,” a Sydney pop-music television show. The prize was a trip to New York City and a record-company audition there.

The audition did not pan out, and her career got off to a slow, discouraging start. Before Capitol signed her in 1970, at least 27 record labels rejected her, and she and her new husband, Jeff Wald, who was now her manager, moved - first to Chicago, then to Los Angeles.

Times were hard, especially when the couple lived in New York. In “The Woman I Am: A Memoir” (2006), Ms. Reddy wrote, “When we did eat, it was spaghetti, and we spent what little money we had on cockroach spray.”

Ms. Reddy’s first hit was a 1971 cover of “I don’t know how to love him,” from the award-winning stage show “Jesus Christ Superstar,” which got to #13 at Billboard's chart on 8 May 1971. “I Am Woman,” with Ms. Reddy’s lyrics and Ray Burton’s music, came a year later.

Ms. Reddy was a frequent guest in the early ’70s on variety, music and talk shows like “The Mike Douglas Show,” “The Carol Burnett Show,” “The David Frost Show,” “The Merv Griffin Show” and “The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour.” “The Helen Reddy Show” (1973) was an eight-episode summer replacement series on NBC.

She made her big-screen debut in the disaster movie “Airport 1975” (released in 1974) as a guitar-playing nun who comforts a sick little girl (Linda Blair) on an almost certainly doomed 747. Ms. Reddy always liked to point out that Gloria Swanson and Myrna Loy were also in the cast.

That was followed by a starring role in the Disney movie “Pete’s Dragon” (1977), as a skeptical New England lighthouse keeper who doubts an orphaned boy’s stories about his animated fire-breathing pet.

After a cameo in the film version of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” (1978), starring Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees, it was on to guest spots on “The Love Boat” and “Fantasy Island.”

By the 1980s, her glory days were largely in the past, and she was bored. “I remember the Vegas days when it was two shows a night, seven nights a week,” she told The Chicago Tribune in 2013, “and it became so rote that I’d be thinking about wallpaper while I was singing.”

Ms. Reddy’s Broadway career consisted of replacing the lead in “Blood Brothers,” a musical set in Liverpool, for a few months in 1995. But she had a busy stage career elsewhere, starring in productions of “Anything Goes,” “Call Me Madam” and “Shirley Valentine” in England and in the United States, from Provincetown to Sacramento.

The last Helen Reddy song to make the American charts was “I Can’t Say Goodbye to You” (1981). “Imagination” (1983) was her last album. Her final screen appearance was in “The Perfect Host” (2010), a crime comedy with David Hyde Pierce.

Ms.Reddy performing in Sydney, Australia, in 2009. 

When Ms. Reddy retired in 2002, she meant business: She went back to school, got a degree in clinical hypnotherapy and practiced as a therapist and motivational speaker. In 2012, after a public appearance at her half sister’s birthday party, she announced a show business comeback and made several concert appearances in the United States before retiring again.

She was a strong believer in past-lives regression. (In 1969, as a newcomer in Los Angeles, she studied parapsychology part time at U.C.L.A.) In her 2006 memoir, in a slightly surreal section on British royalty, she declared that the Duchess of Windsor had been the reincarnation of Richard III and that Elizabeth II and Princess Margaret had been, in past lives, the little princes Richard had once locked in the Tower of London.

Ms. Reddy married and divorced three times. In 1961, she married Kenneth Claude Weate, an older musician who was a family friend. They had a daughter and divorced in 1966. In 1968, she married Mr. Wald, and they had a son. They separated in 1981, when he checked into a treatment facility for cocaine addiction, and divorced two years later. That same year, she married Milton Ruth, a drummer in her band. They divorced in 1995.

Survivors include her two children, Traci Wald Donat, a daughter from her first marriage, and Jordan Sommers, a son from her second; her half sister, Toni Lamond, an Australian singer and actress; and one grandchild.

A feature-film biography of Ms. Reddy, “I Am Woman,” had its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2019. The Hollywood Reporter called it “entertaining and sharply packaged,” with a “breakout performance” by Tilda Cobham-Hervey as Ms. Reddy.

In a 2013 interview, Ms. Reddy seemed philosophical. “I am at the age where I can just kick back and say what a wonderful life I’ve had,” she told The Sydney Morning Herald. And she laughed when one very familiar question came up: whether she was nervous the first time she went onstage.

“I don’t remember the first time I went onstage,” she said.

Helen Reddy in 1977. 

Helen Reddy, Australian singer of feminist anthem 'I Am Woman', dies aged 78

The singer, whose career was celebrated in the 2019 biopic of the same name, had been diagnosed with dementia several years ago

29 September 2020

Stephanie Convery

Helen Reddy, the Australian singer best known for her anthemic 1972 hit I Am Woman, has died at 78.

A statement from Reddy’s children, Traci and Jordan, was posted to her official fan page on Tuesday afternoon.

I Am Woman: how Helen Reddy’s music roared through the women’s movement

Reddy might have once been famously called the “queen of housewife rock” by Alice Cooper, but her music captured the zeal of a generation of women radicalised by the sixties and a nascent second-wave feminist movement.

Reddy became a star despite pushback from record companies at the time, many of which believed there was little money to be made in music by women. In the early 70s, Reddy’s songs dominated the Billboard charts. In 1972, she won a Grammy for best female pop vocal for I Am Woman, becoming the first Australian to do so. She was the world’s top-selling female vocalist in 1973 and 1974.

By the end of her career Reddy had 15 top 40 singles and three no. 1 hits, including her most popular, I Am Woman, and had sold more than 25m albums in the United States alone.

Reddy was born in Melbourne in 1941 to a family embedded in the performing arts. She left school at 15 to perform on the road with them, before launching an independent career.

At the age of 20, Reddy met and married musician Kenneth Weate. The relationship was short-lived; after it ended, Reddy moved back to Sydney with her baby daughter, Traci.

She moved to New York in 1966 with Traci after winning a talent competition that offered the winner a potential recording opportunity for Mercury Records. She was unsuccessful but undaunted, and decided to remain in the States and try to make a career as a singer, despite having very little money and few prospects. Due to issues with her visa, she made trips back and forth to Canada to work.

In 1968, she met her future music manager Jeff Wald at a party. The couple were married quickly, and Reddy decided to stay in the US.

Reddy, Wald and Traci lived frugally until, after frequent lobbying, Wald managed to secure Reddy the opportunity to record a single at Capital Records. It was the intended B-side of that single, I Don’t Know How To Love Him, from the musical Jesus Christ Superstar, that kicked off Reddy’s career, reaching no. 13 on the Billboard charts in 1971.

I Am Woman was released the following year, and by December had topped the charts, making Reddy the first Australian singer to have a number one hit in the United States.

I Am Woman set off a chain of hits for the Reddy, including Delta Dawn, Angie Baby, Leave Me Alone (Ruby Red Dress) and You and Me Against the World. By the mid-70s, she was performing to packed out crowds in Vegas, with the likes of Joan Rivers and Barry Manilow opening for her.

She appeared on talk shows and variety programs, including The Bobby Darin Show, The Muppet Show, and took up a recurring co-hosting slot on The Midnight Special.

Reddy also developed a minor film and TV career, including roles in the thriller Airport 1975 (1974) and the family film, Pete’s Dragon (1977). Later in life, she would cameo as herself on Family Guy.

Reddy’s music career had tapered off by the 1980s, but I Am Woman still reverberated around the industry, reappearing in film and TV soundtracks and as pop culture shorthand for feminist empowerment. In 2006, Reddy was inducted in to the Australian Recording Industry Association Hall of Fame.

Reddy’s former husband and manager Jeff Wald reflected in a piece for the Guardian in August this year on the attitudes of the record companies to Reddy’s success. “The record executives said: ‘How can you let your wife do that women’s lib crap? It’ll end her career!’” he said. “I don’t ‘let her’ do anything. I didn’t marry somebody that you gotta ‘let’.”

His comments came as Reddy’s life and career were immortalised in a feature film, I Am Woman, directed by Unjoo Moon and starring Tilda Cobham-Hervey as Reddy.

Moon paid tribute to Reddy in a statement on Tuesday, saying: “When I first met Helen Reddy she told me that I would be in her life for many years. What followed was an amazing seven-year friendship during which she entrusted me with telling her story in a film that celebrates her life, her talents and her amazing legacy.

“I will forever be grateful to Helen for teaching me so much about being an artist, a woman and a mother. She paved the way for so many and the lyrics that she wrote for I Am Woman changed my life forever like they have done for so many other people and will continue to do for generations to come.”

Reddy is survived by her children, Traci and Jordan, and her sister Toni Lamond.