Natalie Cole, who became a million-selling, Grammy-winning pop hitmaker with her 1975 debut album and went on to even greater popularity when she followed the example of her father, Nat King Cole, has died in Los Angeles. She was 65. The cause was "ongoing health issues", her family said. Cole had a kidney transplant in 2009 and had suffered from other ailments recently, forcing the cancellation of tour dates in November and December.Cole had a light, supple, perpetually optimistic voice, full of syncopated turns and airborne swoops, drawing on both the nuances of jazz and the dynamics of gospel.It brought her million-selling albums in the '70s, '80s and '90s as she moved from the sound of her own generation to that of her parents."The biggest similarities between Ms Cole and her father are in attitude. Instead of working toward catharsis, they aspire to a genteel elegance, balance and good feeling," Stephen Holden wrote in the New York Times in 1993. "But where the ultimate direction of the father's singing was an easy chair on a moonlit porch, his daughter's tenser, more brittle singing evokes an urban, indoor setting ... She brings a steady current of soul-music sassiness."Cole was equally at home in the pop-soul of her No1 1975 hit, This Will Be (An Everlasting Love), and in her technology-assisted duet with her late father in 1991, based on his 1951 recording of Unforgettable.story_article_left1Both songs brought her Grammy Awards. The Unforgettable ... With Love album, on which Cole sang her father's hits, also swept the top Grammys - including album, record and song of the year - and sold seven million copies in the US alone.Cole repeatedly overcame personal setbacks. Her first run of success in the '70s was followed by struggles with addiction in the early '80s, a period she wrote about in her 2000 autobiography, Angel on My Shoulder. She went through rehab in 1983."I just can't have fun with drugs the way some people can," she told the Los Angeles Times in 1985. "They can get high or have a drink and go home. I'm not like that." In 2009, as a result of hepatitis C that she believed she had contracted through past intravenous drug use, she underwent chemotherapy and a kidney transplant. But she continued to perform well into 2015.Natalie Cole was born on February 6 1950. Her mother, Maria Cole, had sung with the Duke Ellington Orchestra. Natalie grew up surrounded by music and celebrities, and she made her recording debut as a child, singing with her father on a Christmas album. But after Nat's death in 1965, she turned away from music. She majored in child psychology and graduated in 1972.But she was soon singing in clubs - although she resisted singing her father's material. "I had to do my own songs in my own way," she told Rolling Stone in 1977. She was noticed by producers Chuck Jackson and Marvin Yancy, who wrote much of her early material. She married Yancy in 1976, the first of three marriages.Cole is survived by her son, Robert Yancy, and her two sisters, Timolin Cole and Casey Cole.Capitol Records, which was also Nat's label, signed Cole and released, in 1975, her debut album, Inseparable, which drew comparisons to Aretha Franklin. She was named best new artist at the 1976 Grammys. But her pop profile dwindled, in part because of her drug problems.Her career was revived in 1987, after rehab, with Everlasting, which included three top 10 pop singles: Jump Start, the ballad I Live for Your Love and her version of Bruce Springsteen's Pink Cadillac.Yet it was with Unforgettable ... With Love in 1991, leaping back to a previous generation's songs, that Cole would establish her latter-day career. Unforgettable reminded the record business that there was a large audience for music offering comfort far from the cutting edge.1950-2015..