Actress Carol Channing dead at 97

Carol Channing, who won over audiences with a giddy, guileless charm in trademark roles in “Hello Dolly” and “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” died on Tuesday at the age of 97, her publicist Harlan Boll said.

Channing died of natural causes at her home in Rancho Mirage, California.

In a career that spanned seven decades, the saucer-eyed, raspy-voiced musical-comedy star never shook her associations with matchmaker Dolly Levi from the 1964 Broadway musical “Hello Dolly!” or gold digger Lorelei Lee in Anita Loos’s “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.”

(Reporting by Scott Malone in Boston; Editing by Bernadette Baum)