Maria Cole: 1940s jazz singer and wife of the legendary Nat 'King' Cole

Maria Cole, who has died aged 89, was the widow of the crooner and jazz pianist Nat "King" Cole and mother of the singer Natalie Cole.

Maria and Nat Cole, the intimate voice on such hits as Unforgettable and Ramblin' Rose, were married for nearly 20 years until his death in 1965.

As a singer herself in the 1940s, Maria Cole enjoyed a successful jazz career in her own right, singing with big bands led by Benny Carter, Count Basie and Duke Ellington before meeting her husband. Indeed, she was performing at Club Zanzibar in New York as the opening act for a cabaret show starring The Mills Brothers, when she was introduced to Cole, then leading his own jazz trio.

She was born Maria Hawkins on August 1 1922 in Boston, Massachusetts, the daughter of a postal worker. When she was two her mother died in childbirth leaving her father to care for her and her two sisters.

Maria and a sister soon moved to North Carolina to live with an aunt. As a child she took voice and piano lessons, and after graduating in 1938 from the Palmer Memorial Institute, one of the country's most distinguished African-American schools, she returned to Boston, attending a clerical college by day and singing with a jazz orchestra at night. Subsequently she moved to New York to pursue a career with Benny Carter's band.

In 1943 she married Spurgeon Ellington, a wartime flyer with the Tuskegee Airmen. He was killed two years later during a routine post-war training flight.

After performing briefly with Count Basie, Maria's big break came when Duke Ellington signed her as a vocalist. She stayed with him until 1946, when she broke away to work as a solo singer at Club Zanzibar as a curtain-raiser for The Mills Brothers.

Nat Cole, who had divorced his first wife that year, was also on the bill with his jazz trio.

The couple married on Easter Day 1948 at a lavish ceremony in Harlem. Cole was already a national star, having had his first hit five years earlier with his song Straighten Up And Fly Right.

But when the newly-weds bought a mansion in the fashionable all-white Hancock Park area of Los Angeles, other local residents staged a protest about the property being sold to a black couple. A Supreme Court ruling that covenants barring racial groups from owning property were legally unenforceable meant that the Coles could keep the house.

Although the property was seized by the US government in 1951 for alleged non-payment of income tax, the claim was settled and the couple and their children continued to live there.

In 1950 Maria Cole resumed her singing career, recording several songs with her husband for Capitol Records, and the couple travelled widely in Europe, Nat Cole making regular stage and television appearances in Britain as well as at leading venues across the United States.

She appeared with him in October 1955 on Ed Sullivan's television show Toast Of The Town. The following year his musical-variety series The Nat "King" Cole Show became the first on American television to be hosted by an African-American.

After Cole's death from lung cancer in 1965, Maria Cole established the Cole Cancer Foundation and again returned to her singing career, beginning at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas in late 1966 followed by a television appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. She also produced a play written by James Baldwin and was active in charity work.

In 1967 she began co-hosting a live afternoon chat and variety show with Stan Bohrman on local television in Los Angeles. Two years later, she married a television writer and producer, Gary Devore. They were divorced in 1978.

With Nat Cole she had five children through birth and adoption. Three of them, Natalie and her twin sisters Timolin and Casey, survive her.

Maria Cole, born August 1 1922, died July 10 2012