Singer Anne Bushnell
Anne Elizabeth Bushnell was born in Dublin on March 28, 1939. As a child she danced on the stage of the Theatre Royal. She went to school in St Louis’ Convent, Rathmines, where she was a junior champion Irish dancer and performed in musicals and plays. She later recalled the nuns trying to stop her singing jazz — “the music of the night” — and the songs of her heroine Judy Garland. Ironically, in the mid-Eighties, she was awarded the freedom of the city of New Orleans in recognition of her jazz singing.
After school she went to commercial college and qualified as a typist, but she always wanted to be a performer and was a feature of the jazz clubs and cabaret circuit in Dublin in the late Sixties, performing whenever she got a chance.
In the 1960s she began singing at jazz venues around Dublin. An Irish Times review of a concert at Liberty Hall in 1968, described her as “a most pleasant singer, partly in the ‘torch’ tradition”.
Also in 1968 she sang the entry Ballad to a Boy in the RTE National Song contest. She had two chart hits in the early 1970s, as a member of the folk-oriented group Family Pride.
She married her childhood sweetheart Tony Bushnell, a part-time musician and drummer, at the age of 20.
She continued as a jazz vocalist with big bands led by Noel Kelehan, Jim Farley and Jim Doherty, and regularly performed on RTÉ radio and television.
In 1975 she appeared in the musical Innish at the Abbey Theatre; her brother, the actor John Kavanagh, was also in the cast. Her next stage role was a year later in Noel Pearson’s production of Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris at the Shelbourne Hotel.
In 1978 she featured in a Christmas show with Des Smyth, Ring a Little Bing, at the Eblana Theatre. In the meantime she made her first appearance at the Cork Jazz Festival. In the early 1980s she made several appearances at the Gaiety Theatre, and in 1988 supported Frankie Laine at the National Concert Hall.
She was much sought after as a session singer, and sang backing vocals when Johnny Logan won the Eurovision Song Contest in 1980.
In 1984 she took the lead in Leland Bardwell’s musical play about Piaf, No Regrets, at the National Stadium. The production also went on tour to Kilkenny, Cork, Limerick and Galway.
In 2002 she portrayed Garland in Born in a Trunk at the National Concert Hall, accompanied by the RTÉ Concert Orchestra.
She performed abroad – in Britain, USA, the then East Germany, Norway, Turkey and Spain – and had a part in the film Agnes Browne (2000). In 1994 she received a Cheshire Foundation award in recognition of her services to charity.
Anne Bushnell died aged 72 on April 21, 2011, after a lengthy battle with cancer. She is survived by her husband Tony, son Paul, a session musician, and daughter Suzanne, a member of thefemale harmony group, The Fallen Angels.