Barbara Cook was born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1927. Her father was a traveling hat salesman and her mother was an operator for Southern Bell. Her father left the family when Barbara was 6, and her parents divorced. Her mother blamed Barbara. When she was 3, her only sister Patricia died of pneumonia and whooping cough as an 18-month-old infant.

Barbara spoke about this near the end of her life: “My younger sister had just died of double pneumonia, and I heard my mother or one of our relatives say that maybe Patricia would have lived if I hadn’t given her whooping cough. I was three years old, so I thought I killed her. I grew up thinking that her death was my fault. I know that’s not true now, but I still live with that guilt. I think my feeling about my sister has really held me back because I have this feeling that I don’t deserve it, you know? And, I realize that’s not true, and I’ve realized it for a long time, but I believed it for a long time, too.”

She began singing at a very young age at the Elks Club. In high school, kids made fun of her because she wore the same clothes to school all the time and didn’t have the money to join a sorority. When she was 20 Cook moved to New York in 1948. She found work as a typist, sought work as an actress, and started singing in clubs and resorts. After 2 years she was engaged by the Blue Angel Club. “The first work I did in NY was in a place called the Blue Angel when I first came to NY. I didn’t do those big clubs like the Copacabana and all that you know. I did the more artsy ones if you know what I mean.”

In 1951 she made her broadway debut in the musical Flahooley, and was cast in the City Center revival of Oklahoma! In 1952 Barbara married David LeGrant, with whom she  performed in a national tour of Oklahoma! 1952 also marked her first TV appearance, which was on the Armstrong Circle Theater show. In 1954 she appeared in the soap opera Golden Windows, sang in the City Center revival of Carousel and starred in a TV production of Babes in Toyland. In 1955 Cook won a Theater World award for her performances on Broadway in Plain and Fancy. In 1956 she sang in the original Broadway production of Candide.

She soon began appearing regularly on TV, in Bloomer Girl, The Yeoman of the Guard, Hansel and Gretel, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Ed Sullivan Show, The Perry Como Show, The Dinah Shore Shevy Show, and The Play of the Week. In 1958 she won a Tony award for her performances in the original cast of The Music Man. Her one child, Adam, was born in 1959. The next year she starred in the City Center revival of The King and I, and in the next 2 years in the Broadway productions of The Gay Life, and She Loves Me. She Loves Me featured her in the song Vanilla Ice Cream, which became one of her signature songs.

Barbara and her husband divorced in 1965. Marital problems, alcoholism and obesity interrupted her Broadway stardom in the 1960s and she worked less frequently. The tragedies of the past: the death of her sister, the abandonment of her father, the undiagnosed mental illness of her mother, living through the poverty of the Great Depression all resulted in Cook’s insecurities formed during her childhood in Atlanta, and were not cured by her success. As an unemployed single mother, she was, in her own words, “a drunk — not a nice, ladylike drinker, but a drunk. I just stayed home and got drunk every night by myself … I didn’t shower or brush my teeth for days at a time.” Cook described the depression that left her paralyzed on the couch, surrounded by filth, empty liquor bottles and a mountain of unpaid bills.

She said: ”The depression that comes with alcoholism creeps up on you so slowly you don’t know when it started. It’s so common that you think: Oh, I drink because I have problems. And if I fix the problems, I won’t need to drink. But what happens, of course, is the drinking becomes the problem, and you can’t fix anything until you stop drinking. I don’t know exactly when it became more difficult to be a good mother, but Adam went to live with his father when he was 14. I was really in bad shape. I had tried again and again and again to stop drinking, and I couldn’t do it.” But she did do it. Speaking about her 2016 autobiography, Then and Now, A Memoir, she said: “I wanted to be honest. And I’m hoping maybe people who are reading the book who need help will have an open mind and hopefully be helped. That’s the final thing I thought about writing the book—because I put it off a long time, and I didn’t really want to do it because I knew how hard it would be. And then finally it occurred to me that if somebody’s in trouble and they have an open mind, maybe there are things in the book that could help them. Maybe they could see that you can have a second life. And you can stop drinking. It ain’t easy, boy.” When Cook stopped drinking in 1977 her depression subsided as well. She could not, however, conquer her problems with weight.

For some time she had difficulty getting hired. At one point she lost her home, and was staying with a friend and shoplifting food. Terribly depressed, she gained an incredible amount of weight. Her ex-husband told her son that he didn’t expect her to live much longer. Then in 1975 with her new accompanist, the composer, Wally Harper, she made her Carnegie Hall debut in a highly successful solo concert. She credited Harper with helping to get her singing again. Cook and Wally Harper returned to Carnegie Hall in 1980, and performed together all over the world, including at the White House for Presidents Carter, Reagan, Bush Sr. and Clinton. She worked with Harper for 30 years until his death in 2004.

For many years Cook helped young singers find their core by teaching master classes. She said: “What actors need to do is to find a way to show people their despair, their joy, their pain, their exhilaration. All of these deep, deep emotional things, good and bad, so that if you’re able to do that, then there’s a kind of resonance that happens.” Her role models were Ella Fitzgerald and Rosemary Clooney, and the performer who made the deepest impression on her was the celebrated cabaret singer: Mabel Mercer.

Cook didn’t want to sing when the house lights were completely turned down because then through the glare of the stage lights, she would only see blackness as she looked out into the audience; she wanted the house lights only dimmed because she wanted to see that she was communicating with a room full of people, so not enough light to see their individual faces, but at least to see that the people she was singing to, so that it was an intimate experience. “I’ve been singing intimately for people all my life cause I don’t remember when I didn’t sing. And of course my family would ask me to sing and so as a little thing I’d sing for them.”

In 1985 Cook appeared with the NY Philharmonic in 3 performances of a concert version of Follies. In 1986 Cook recorded The Secret Garden, and in 1987 she sang in a recording of Carousel with the Royal Philharmonic and won the Drama Desk Award for her one-woman broadway show A Concert for the Theatre. In 1988 Cook performed in the world premiere of Carrie with the Royal Shakespeare Company.

In 1994 she made the animated film version of Thumbelina, and was a featured artist at the Carnegie Hall gala that raised money for the performing arts and AIDS research. That year she gave an acclaimed concert series at the Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London, and was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame. In 1997 Cook celebrated her 70th birthday by singing a concert in London accompanied by the Royal Philharmonic. In 1998 Cook was nominated for an Olivier Award for her one-woman show, also in London. In 1999 she was presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Manhattan Association of Cabarets and Clubs. In 2000 Cook sang at the Sydney Olympic Arts Festival and recorded Lucky in the Rain.

In 2001 and 2002 she returned to Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, and London for Barbara Cook’s Mostly Sondheim, which was nominated for 2 Olivier awards and a Tony award. She then took the show on a tour of the U.S. She appeared at Lincoln Center again in 2004 in Barbara Cook’s Broadway, for which she was nominated for a Drama Desk Award and won the NY Drama Critics Circle Award.

At age 77 Cook said: “I’ll sing better five years from now, because I expect I’ll have more courage to be even more open. I consider myself a work in progress. This is not the done deal.”

In 2005 Cook appeared in the solo shows Tribute and No One is Alone and in 2006 she became one of the first female pop singers ever to appear in concert at the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center. And that year she sang at the Kennedy Center for the Silver Anniversary of the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington D.C.

In 2007 Cook performed at the Arts! by George gala at George Mason Univ. in Virginia, and celebrated her 80th birthday singing with the Ft. Lauderdale Gay Men’s Chorus at the Broward Center and by singing a concert at London’s Coliseum Theatre. That year she also gave 4 sold out performances with the NY Philharmonic and was named Musical America’s Vocalist of the Year. In 2008 Cook performed with the English National Ballet in Strictly Gershwin at London’s Royal Albert Hall, and sang highly acclaimed performances in Chicago and San Francisco.

 In 2009 the octogenarian performed with the Princeton Symphony, the Detroit Symphony, and at the Regency in NY. In 2010 she was nominated for another Tony Award for her performances on Broadway in the revue: Sondheim on Sondheim. In 2011 Cook appeared at Carnegie Hall with James Taylor, Bette Midler and Sting for the gala “Celebrating 120 Years of Carnegie Hall”, and capped off the year as a recipient of a Kennedy Center Honor for her lifetime of contributions to American culture.

She celebrated her 85th birthday performing in Los Angeles with the LA Philharmonic and with a sold-out performance at Carnegie Hall. When she was 86 she appeared in New York at Feinstein’s 54 Below Club. She spoke about her art at a break during rehearsals. “I want to learn it absolutely as it’s written and then let it go and just get it off the page. And then fill it with my life’s blood if you know what I mean. They’re songs that allow me to sing emotionally and hopefully touch people, so that it can be a song that has just one line of gold. And I just can’t wait to get there to do it.”

Next she wrote her autobiography which was published in 2016. She returned to Feinsteins 54 Below Club when she was 88! She retired in 2017. When her legs would no longer carry her she said: “I’m not crazy about being seen in this wheelchair. It may be silly, and I’ll probably get over it, but arriving in a wheelchair is not what I want to do. I do need to get over that I think.”

She died from respiratory failure on August 8, 2017 in her NYC apartment. She was 89. The following night, the lights of the Broadway Theatres’ marquees were dimmed in tribute to her. A year before her death she said: “When I sing, I put my whole life into that – in other words, all my memories of all these things that have happened, good and bad. And by singing, that’s what I try to do.”