NEW YORK, USA (AP) — Lena Horne, the enchanting jazz singer and actress known for her plaintive signature song Stormy Weather and for her triumph over the bigotry that allowed her to entertain white audiences but not socialise with them, has died. She was 92.

Horne died Sunday at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, according to hospital spokeswoman Gloria Chin. Chin would not release any other details.

Horne, whose striking beauty and magnetic sex appeal often overshadowed her sultry voice, was remarkably candid about the underlying reason for her success.

“I was unique in that I was a kind of black that white people could accept,” she once said. “I was their daydream. I had the worst kind of acceptance because it was never for how great I was or what I contributed. It was because of the way I looked.”

“I knew her from the time I was born, and whenever I needed anything she was there,” actress Liza Minnelli said Monday. She was funny, sophisticated and truly one of a kind. We lost an original. Thank you Lena.”

Minnelli’s father, director Vincente Minnelli, brought Horne to Hollywood to star in Cabin in the Sky.

In the 1940s, she was one of the first black performers hired to sing with a major white band, the first to play the Copacabana nightclub and among a handful with a Hollywood contract.

In 1943, MGM Studios loaned her to 20th Century Fox to play the role of Selina Rogers in the all-black movie musical Stormy Weather. Her rendition of the title song became a major hit and her signature piece.

On screen, on records and in nightclubs and concert halls, Horne was at home vocally with a wide musical range, from blues and jazz to the sophistication of Rodgers and Hart in songs like The Lady Is a Tramp and Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.

In her first big Broadway success, as the star of Jamaica in 1957, reviewer Richard Watts Jr. called her “one of the incomparable performers of our time”. Songwriter Buddy de Sylva dubbed her “the best female singer of songs”.

But Horne was perpetually frustrated with the public humiliation of racism. Early in her career Horne cultivated an aloof style out of self-preservation, becoming “a woman the audience can’t reach and therefore can’t hurt”, she once said.

When Halle Berry became the first black woman to win the best actress Oscar in 2002, she sobbed: “This moment is for Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll. … It’s for every nameless, faceless woman of colour who now has a chance because this door tonight has been opened.”

Horne was only two when her grandmother, a prominent member of the Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, enrolled her in the NAACP. But she avoided activism until 1945 when she was entertaining at an Army base and saw German prisoners of war sitting up front while black American soldiers were consigned to the rear.

That pivotal moment channeled her anger into something useful.

By the 1960s, Horne was one of the most visible celebrities in the civil rights movement, once throwing a lamp at a customer who made a racial slur in a Beverly Hills restaurant and in 1963 joining 250,000 others in the March on Washington when Martin Luther King Jr gave his I Have a Dream speech.

In the 2009 biography, Stormy Weather, author James Gavin recounts that when Horne was asked by a lover why she’d married a white man, she replied: “To get even with him.”