Beverly Sills, the Brooklyn-born opera diva known for her dazzling voice and bubbly personality, died Monday of cancer, her manager said. She was 78.

It had been revealed last month that Sills was gravely ill with inoperable lung cancer.

Legendary soprano Beverly Sills died Monday at the age of 78.
(Ken Howard/The Metropolitan Opera/Associated Press)

Sills, who never smoked, died about 9 p.m. ET Monday at her Manhattan home with her family and doctor at her side, said her manager, Edgar Vincent.

Sills, a red-haired soprano credited for putting Americans on the international map of opera stars, appeared frequently on The Tonight Show, The Muppet Show and in televised performances with her friend Carol Burnett.

Together, they did a show from the stage of New York City's Metropolitan Opera called Sills and Burnett at the Met, singing duets with funny one-liners thrown in.

Long after the public stopped hearing her sing in 1980, Sills's laughter filled the nation's living rooms as she hosted live TV broadcasts.

Born Belle Miriam Silverman, she quickly became nicknamed Bubbles, an endearment coined by the doctor who delivered her, noting that she was born blowing a bubble of spit.

Sills grew up in a "typical middle-class American Jewish family," as she put it, and was first exposed to opera by listening to her mother's record collection.

In 1947, she made her operatic stage debut in Philadelphia in a bit role in Bizet's Carmen.

Sills became a star with the New York City Opera, where she first performed in 1955 in Johann Strauss Jr.'s Die Fledermaus.

'I was Baby Doe'

Her 1958 appearances as Baby Doe in Douglas Moore's The Ballad of Baby Doe would become among her best known. The opera tells the tale of a silver-mine millionaire who leaves his wife for Baby Doe and eventually dies penniless.

"I loved the role," Sills wrote in her 1976 autobiography. "I read everything that had ever been written about her … I absorbed her so completely in those five weeks of studying the opera that I knew her inside and out. I was Baby Doe."

It was not until late in her career, in 1975, that she achieved the pinnacle, appearing at the Met, the nation's premier opera house.

In her memoir, she said longtime Met general manager Rudolf Bing "had a thing about American singers, especially those who had not been trained abroad: He did not think very much of them."

Sills's Met debut, arranged after Bing retired, was in The Siege of Corinth.

"I was welcomed at the Met like a long-lost child," she said.  

Leadership roles after retirement

Sills retired from the stage in 1980 at age 51 after a three-decade singing career on prestigious stages in North America and Europe, and began a new life as an executive and leader of New York's performing arts community.

She became general director of the New York City Opera, and under her stewardship the opera became the first in the nation to use English supertitles.

In 1994, Sills became chairwoman of New York's Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the first woman and first former artist to hold the position.      

Sills was a master fundraiser, tapping her vast network of
friends and colleagues for a large number of causes, including the Multiple Sclerosis Society. Her daughter, Muffy, has MS and was born deaf.

"One of the things that separates the two-legged creatures from the four-legged ones is compassion," she once said at a fundraiser event in 2005.

Sills's compassion extended to her autistic son and to her husband, who lived with her at their home as his Alzheimer's disease progressed.

She married Peter Greenough, a journalist, in 1956 and was with him until he died in 2006.