If one were to compile a list of entertainers who cheered up Britain in the austere years after the second world war, the American singer and actor Dolores Gray, who has died aged 78, would be among the top names. On June 7 1947, the colourful Irving Berlin musical Annie Get Your Gun burst onto the stage of the London Coliseum, with the ebullient Gray in the title role. The show ran for three years, the longest run in the theatre's history, and Gray, in her first big success, became the toast of the town.
She may not have had as singular a sound and personality as Ethel Merman, who created the part on Broadway, but her voice was almost as powerful and she was more attractive, both in looks and character. When her voice was compared to Merman's, Gray explained, "Actually, my voice is fragile, but I know how to amplify it."
During her stay in London, she took the opportunity to study at the Royal Academy of Art (Rada), and played Nell Gwynne at a performance in aid of the fund to rebuild the Rada theatre. She returned in 1958 to appear triumphantly at the London Palladium, where she was called upon to give her energetic renderings of Doin' What Comes Naturally, You Can't Get A Man With A Gun and I've Got The Sun In The Morning from Annie Get Your Gun.
Gray's association with the west end continued in cabaret at the Talk of the Town in 1963, and as the monstrous stage-mother Rose in the Jule Styne-Stephen Sondheim musical Gypsy (another Merman creation) at the Piccadilly in 1973.
Later, as Carlotta Campion, in Sondheim's Follies at the Shaftesbury in 1987, her legs as long and as shapely as ever, she belted out that hymn to show-biz durability, I'm Still Here, in a manner which nobody could deny. The lyrics catalogue all the events the former chorus girl has survived and the roles she has had to play: "First you're another sloe-eyed vamp/ Then someone's mother, then you're camp."
Gray's own life and career was not as varied as Carlotta's, but it had its share of ups and downs. She was born in Chicago, and after her parents divorced while she was still a child, her mother took her to Hollywood, taught her to sing and act, and encouraged her to perform in clubs in her mid-teens. It was not long before she was discovered by the crooner Rudy Vallee, who put her on his national radio show.
She made her Broadway debut in 1944, in the Cole Porter musical revue Seven Lively Arts - the starry company included Beatrice Lillie, Bert Lahr, Benny Goodman and Alicia Markova. The following year, she played the showgirl Bunny La Fleur in Are You With It? After her first London success, she failed to rescue the Broadway musical Carnival In Flanders, based on the Jacques Feyder film, but, although it ran for only six performances, the show earned Gray a 1954 Tony award and a successful film test at MGM, directed by Vincente Minnelli.
The four films she made for that studio were certainly enlivened by her dynamic singing and witty acting. In the Gene Kelly-Stanley Donen musical It's Always Fair Weather (1955), she played a stunningly dressed television hostess who sings Thanks A Lot But No Thanks, while refusing gifts from wealthy chorus boys, and Music Is Better Than Words. She stood out among the oriental kitsch of Minnelli's Kismet (1955) as Lalume, the wazir's lustful wife, singing Not Since Ninevah and Rahadlakum.
The Opposite Sex (1956), the pallid musical remake of The Women, had Gray competing with Joan Collins, June Allyson, Ann Sheridan and Ann Miller. Her final - and best - film was as Gregory Peck's old flame in Minnelli's comedy Designing Woman (1957), which included a splendid scene of Gray tipping a plate of pasta onto Peck's lap, and a production number, There'll Be Some Changes Made, in which she delivers the song wonderfully unruffled while changing gowns in a rehearsal.
Back on Broadway in 1959, she had another hit as Frenchy (the part played on film by Marlene Dietrich) in the musical Destry Rides Again. Once, during a matinee, the stage curtain caught fire while she and Andy Griffith were performing Anyone Would Love You. As fireman and stagehands fought the flames backstage, the couple kept on singing more loudly than ever.
Gray's marriage to Andrew Crevolin, a California property developer and racehorse owner, ended in divorce. She is survived by a stepdaughter.
· Dolores Gray, actor and singer, born June 7 1924; died June 26 2002