Broadway actress Barbara Cook passed away this morning from respiratory failure at her Manhattan home. She was 89.

Cook became known as "Broadway's favorite ingenue" in the 1950s for originating roles in classic musicals like The Music Man, Candide and She Loves Me. She played the part of Cunegonde in Leonard Bernstein's Candide, where she performed what would become one of her signature songs, "Glitter and Be Gay."

She also originated the role of Marian the librarian in Meredith Wilson's The Music Man, for which she won a Tony for in 1957.

In the late '60s her drinking, depression and weight gain stalled her Broadway career. Cook made a comeback in 1975 when she performed an "extraordinary" concert at Carnegie Hall and was hailed as "the greatest female theatrical cabaret artist of our time." She returned to the stage in the '80s, playing Sally in a critically-acclaimed concert version of Follies at Lincoln Center in 1985.

In recent years she focused on a concert career that resulted in live albums like Barbara Cook’s Broadway and Mostly Sondheim: Live at Carnegie Hall.

Cook was the recepient of a 2011 Kennedy Center Honor and in 2010 she returned to the Broadway stage in Sondheim on Sondheim, for which she was nominated for a Tony.

Cook released her memoir, Barbara Cook: Then and Now, last year and she was supposed to perform a companion off-Broadway production of the same name. It was canceled due to "undue pressure and stress of going straight from writing the memoir to rehearsals." Her son, Adam, announced Cook's retirement earlier this year.

“Very early in my career, I was standing in the wings, waiting to audition, and I thought everybody who sang before me had a better voice, looked prettier, had a better figure. I was always a mess,” she said in an interview. “For some reason, it occurred to me that if I could find a way to really learn who I am and put that into my work, then there could be no real competition — because there’s only one of me.”