Helena Shenel, vocal coach who helped stars including Shirley Bassey – obituary

Helena Shenel, who has died aged 89, was a vocal coach to the stars, helping many who had lost their voices; she claimed to have been consulted by George Michael, Annie Lennox and Shirley Bassey, whose voice faltered in 1985 after the death of her 21-year-old daughter Samantha.

“I just worked with Helena doing these vocal exercises strengthening my vocal cords,” Shirley Bassey said in 2016, recalling how she had dried up mid-concert while trying to sing Goldfinger. “After the year she said, ‘Do you know, I’ve discovered you’ve got another octave that you never use. I’ve never heard you sing that high!’ And she did my spirit the world of good, and my soul, and I went back on stage.”

Helena Shenel recounted how the singer Joe Cocker turned up apologising for being “shaky” because he had not been permitted to bring his drugs into the country; Ozzy Osbourne arrived at her nondescript flat on the border of Maida Vale and Little Venice surrounded by security guards, but being no fan of heavy metal she had to ask which one was the Black Sabbath singer.

On one occasion Shirley Bassey stepped out of the lift and was told by another resident that she “looked just like Shirley Bassey”, to which the singer replied: “A lot of people tell me that.”

Lulu flew her to New York to teach Gurumayi Chidvilasananda, the leader of Siddha Yoga, how not to lose her voice while chanting endless sacred mantras. However, she insisted that there was little danger of getting caught up in the movement because she was “not devotee material”.

Much of Helena Shenel’s work centred on the anatomy, encouraging singers to relax as they performed. When they were on tour or unable to meet in person, she would record vocal exercises on tape, always following her maxim that “unnecessary effort disrupts function”.

She was born Helena Patricia Leahy in Mayfair, central London, on January 11 1931, the younger of two daughters of Adelina von Reuter, a “gaiety girl” who danced in the West End, and her husband Michael Leahy, a former amateur heavyweight boxer from Limerick who had lost a leg fighting for the British at Mons in 1914.

In a previous life, Helena was convinced, she had been Giuditta Pasta, the 19th-century Jewish-Italian soprano for whom Bellini wrote his opera Norma.

Michael became a medical hypnotist and his daughter, who later deployed some of his techniques, recalled meeting clients such as Edwina Mountbatten and Somerset Maugham at their home.

During the Second World War she was dispatched to his family in Ireland, returning with a love of horses and a strong Irish accent that was tamed at Poles, a Catholic boarding school in Hertfordshire, where learning to curtsy took priority over typing skills.

She left at 15 to join the repertory theatre, and at 17 had an affair with Paolo Silveri, an Italian baritone twice her age whom she had met by the stage door at Covent Garden and who inspired her to become a singer.

Her father paid for her to take lessons with the tenor Dino Borgioli, who had enjoyed a pre-war opera career in London, although she recalled that Borgioli once cancelled their class because the conductor Arturo Toscanini, his mentor, was in town.

Over the years she had minor roles in musicals, including The Most Happy Fella, The King and I, and Pickwick with Harry Secombe in 1963. She also appeared in the revue GB presented by the religious movement Moral Rearmament, and later sang in Cats and Evita.

But her stage career never really took off, while married life required more sociable working hours than the theatre would allow. Twice she lost her voice and was saved by a faith healer.

She turned to coaching after being heard practising alone on stage by a fellow singer, who asked if she could help with his technique, and gradually built up a following. Meanwhile, she was working with Norman Punt, an ear, nose and throat specialist who, she said, taught her about anatomy while she taught him about singing.

Her first celebrity client was Paul Young, who consulted her after losing his voice while on tour promoting his 1983 hit Wherever I Lay My Hat. Others included the actress Su Pollard, the singer Peter Gabriel and the crooner Michael Dore, a former member of the Swingle Singers, whom she named as her musical heir.

Helena Shenel was twice married: in the 1950s to Hugh Greville-Morris, and in 1957 to Rifat Shenel, a Turkish-Cypriot violinist turned restaurant manager.

Both marriages were dissolved, though she nursed Shenel and her subsequent partner, Richard Alda, a singing teacher through long illnesses; she and Alda had met in 1974 on the set of the Gene Wilder comedy-mystery The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’s Smarter Brother. There were no children.

Helena Shenel, born January 11 1931, died September 17 2020