The artist Yoko Ono, the widow of the late former Beatle John Lennon, was admitted to a New York City hospital on Friday after complaining of severe flu-like symptoms, her West Coast-based spokesman said.

Spokesman Elliot Mintz denied US media reports that Ono, 83, had suffered a possible stroke or heart attack, and said he understood she would be released from the hospital on Saturday.

Ono had called her doctor, who said her symptoms sounded like the flu, and advised her to go to the hospital as a precaution, Mintz said. He did not know if she admitted herself or was taken by ambulance.

Her career as an artist has spanned more than five decades. Last year, the Museum of Modern Art in New York marked her achievements with an exhibition of her early works showing how her ideas influenced the development of art in the city in the 1960s.

Ono, also an experimental musician and film-maker, was once described by Lennon as "the world's most famous unknown artist: everybody knows her name but nobody knows what she does."

She and Lennon were married on March 20, 1969, and their son, Sean, was born in 1975. Lennon was shot to death on Dec. 8, 1980, outside the famed Dakota apartment building just west of New York's Central Park.