Roberta Flack obituary: The trainee opera singer whose career was transformed by Clint Eastwood's Play Misty for Me

The song topped the Billboard pop chart the following year and won an award for record of the year.

The year after that, Killing Me Softly With His Song won the same award and Flack won the Grammy for best female pop vocal performance.

A neighbour of John Lennon in New York’s Dakota Building, her repertoire included an album of Beatles covers called Let It Be Roberta in 2012.

She was born on February 10 1937 in North Carolina but grew up in Virginia and started classical piano lessons at the age of nine.

She was awarded a full scholarship to Howard University in Washington DC aged 15 and hoped to become an opera singer, a dream that was put on hold when she returned to North Carolina after her father’s death in 1959.

She went back to the capital and taught at several schools and in the early 1960s she began accompanying opera singers at the Tivoli opera restaurant in Georgetown, later playing in various clubs in the Washington area before taking up a residency at Mr Henry’s.

After watching her perform, jazz musician Les McCann helped to launch Flack’s recording career and she was signed to Atlantic Records after decades of classical study, teaching music and accompanying opera singers.

Her debut album, First Take, was released in 1969 and featured a blend of gospel, soul, flamenco and jazz. The tune saw a resurgence in popularity in the 1990s when hip-hop trio Fugees recorded a new version.

Flack went on to collaborate with artists including Miles Davis and Donny Hathaway, was awarded a lifetime achievement award by the Recording Academy in 2020.

In 2022, a feature-length documentary about the soul singer, called Roberta, told of her rise to stardom against the backdrop of America’s civil rights movement.

Flack was briefly married to the bass player Stephen Novosel and earlier had a son, the singer and keyboardist Bernard Wright.