Her debut album First Take (1969) included the song The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face. But the ballad didn’t become a No 1 hit until actor/director Clint Eastwood heard it on the radio and asked her if he could feature it in his 1971 film Play Misty for Me.
Flack scored her second No 1 hit in 1973 with Killing Me Softly With His Song, and her third the following year with Feel Like Making Love.
She also collaborated with other artists, including Peabo Bryson, author Maya Angelou and Donny Hathaway. Their single Where Is The Love” was a top 10 hit and earned a Grammy for best pop performance by a duo in 1973. The pair also recorded other songs, including The Closer I Get to You.
“A great collaboration is one in which the combination of two talents creates something unique and meaningful that neither could have without the other,” Flack told Forbes in 2021.
The celebrated singer toured with jazz trumpeter Miles Davis in the 1980s and performed for the late South African President Nelson Mandela in 1999. The same year she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
She worked with the Alvin Ailey Dance Company and performed with the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra.
Flack, who was an inspiration for other artists, produced and arranged her own music and worked on scores for films and television. The singer released the soundtrack album for the 1981 Richard Pryor film Bustin’ Loose.
In 2006, she established the Roberta Flack School of Music at the Hyde Leadership Charter School in New York to provide music education for children. The Roberta Flack Foundation, which she founded in 2019, also supports music and animal welfare.
Flack married jazz bassist Steve Novosel in 1966. They divorced in 1972.
After suffering from a stroke in 2016, she gave up touring two years later. A PBS documentary about her life, American Masters: Roberta Flack, was released in January 2023.
“I’ve always tried to express myself musically from a place of complete honesty in the hope that each person can find his or her own story when they listen in a way that helps them to feel their own truth,” she told Forbes.
