Ivor Novello
Ivor Novello | |
---|---|
Born | David Ivor Davies 15 January 1893 |
Died | 6 March 1951 London, England | (aged 58)
Occupations |
|
Years active | 1914–1951 |
Partner | Bobbie Andrews (c. 1917–1951, until Novello's death) |
Ivor Novello (born David Ivor Davies; 15 January 1893 – 6 March 1951) was a Welsh actor, dramatist, singer and composer who became one of the most popular British entertainers of the first half of the 20th century.
He was born into a musical family, and his first successes were as a songwriter. His first big hit was "
In the 1920s he turned to acting, first in British films and then on stage, with considerable success in both. He starred in two silent films directed by Alfred Hitchcock, The Lodger and Downhill (both 1927). On stage, he played the title character in the first London production of Liliom (1926). Novello briefly went to Hollywood but soon returned to Britain, where he had more successes, especially on stage, appearing in his own lavish West End productions of musicals. The best-known of these were Glamorous Night (1935) and The Dancing Years (1939).
From the 1930s he often performed with Zena Dare, writing parts for her in his works. He continued to write for film, but in his later career his biggest successes were with stage musicals: Perchance to Dream (1945), King's Rhapsody (1949) and Gay's the Word (1951).
The Ivor Novello Awards were named after him in 1955.
Early years
Novello was born David Ivor Davies in Cardiff, Wales, to David Davies (c. 1852–1931), a rent collector for the city council,[2] and his wife, Clara Novello Davies, an internationally known singing teacher and choral conductor.[3] As a boy, Novello was a successful singer in the Welsh Eisteddfod.[4] His mother set up as a voice teacher in London, where he met leading performers, including members of George Edwardes's Gaiety Theatre company, classical musicians such as Landon Ronald, and singers such as Adelina Patti.[2] Another of his mother's associates was Clara Butt, who taught him to sing "Abide with Me" when he was a boy of six.[5]
Novello was educated privately in Cardiff and then in Gloucester, where he studied harmony and counterpoint with Herbert Brewer, the cathedral organist.[6] From there he won a scholarship to Magdalen College School in Oxford, where he was a solo treble in the college choir. He later said that this prolonged youthful exposure to early sacred choral music had turned his tastes, in reaction, to lush romantic music.[2] Although Brewer had told him he would not have a career in music,[3] Novello from his early youth showed a facility for writing songs, and when he was only 15, one of his songs was published.[7] After leaving school, he gave piano lessons in Cardiff, and then moved to London in 1913 with his mother. They took a flat above the Strand Theatre, which became his London home for the rest of his life.[2][8]
In London he found a mentor in Sir Edward Marsh, a well-known patron of the arts and Winston Churchill's secretary. Marsh encouraged him to compose and introduced him to people who could help his career.[2] He adopted his mother's middle name, "Novello", as his professional surname, although he did not change it legally until 1927.[9]
In 1914, at the start of the
Composer and actor
Novello continued to write songs while serving in the RNAS. He had his first stage success with Theodore & Co in 1916, a production by George Grossmith Jr. and Edward Laurillard with a score composed by Novello and the young Jerome Kern.[12] In the same year, Novello contributed to André Charlot's revue See-Saw.[2] In 1917 he wrote for another Grossmith and Laurillard production, the operetta Arlette, for which he contributed additional numbers to an existing French score by Jane Vieu and Guy le Feuvre.[13] In the same year, Marsh introduced him to the actor Bobbie Andrews, who became Novello's life partner.[2] Andrews introduced Novello to the young Noël Coward. Coward, six years Novello's junior, was deeply envious of Novello's effortless glamour.[6] He wrote, "I just felt suddenly conscious of the long way I had to go before I could break into the magic atmosphere in which he moved and breathed with such nonchalance".[14]
In 1918 and after the war, Novello continued to write successfully for musical comedy and revue. The former included Who's Hooper? (1919), an adaptation of a Pinero play, with a book by Fred Thompson, lyrics by Clifford Grey, and music by Howard Talbot and Novello,[15] and The Golden Moth by Thompson and P. G. Wodehouse (1921), for which Novello provided the entire score.[16] For Charlot, he contributed numbers to the revues Tabs (1918), A to Z (1921) and Puppets (1924). For the second of these, his songs included one of his few well-known comedy numbers, "And Her Mother Came Too", with lyrics by Dion Titheradge, written for Jack Buchanan.[2]
At the same time as his successes as a composer, Novello was making a career as an actor. With "a classic profile that gained him matinee idol status amongst the film-going public",[17] he was sought out, on the strength of a publicity photograph, by the Swiss film director Louis Mercanton. Mercanton offered him a silent-film role as the romantic lead in The Call of the Blood (1920).[6] In the same year, he made another film for Mercanton, Miarka.[2] Novello made his first British film, Carnival, the following year.[2]
Novello made his stage debut in 1921 in Deburau by Sacha Guitry,[18] and, among other stage engagements in the next years, he played Bingley in a charity adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.[19][20] At about this time, Novello had an affair with the writer Siegfried Sassoon; it was short-lived, but in the words of Sassoon's biographer John Stuart Roberts, Novello "was a consummate flirt who collected lovers as he gathered lilacs".[21]
In 1923, Novello made his American movie debut in D. W. Griffith's The White Rose, and the same year he starred in The Man Without Desire, among other British films.[22] He next co-wrote, produced and starred in the successful 1924 play The Rat.[23] The play was made into a film in 1925, which was so successful that two sequels followed in 1926 and 1928.[2] His dramatic roles in the West End included the title character in the first London production of Ferenc Molnár's Liliom (1926).[24]
Other films in which Novello starred included Alfred Hitchcock's The Lodger, where he played the title character, and Downhill (both in 1927). The British film company Gainsborough Pictures offered Novello a lucrative contract, which enabled him to buy a country house in Littlewick Green, near Maidenhead.[2] He renamed the property 'Redroofs', and he entertained there famously and with little regard for convention. Cecil Beaton, noting the frequent homosexual excesses, coined the phrase, "the Ivor – Noel naughty set".[25] Coward had by now caught up to Novello professionally, despite a joint disaster when Novello starred in Coward's play Sirocco in 1927, which was a débâcle, and closed within a month of opening.[26][27] In 1928 Novello starred in the silent adaptation of Coward's much more successful The Vortex, and made his last silent film, A South Sea Bubble.[2] During the late 1920s Novello was the most popular male British film star, and was often dubbed Britain's "handsomest screen actor".[28][29]
Novello returned to composing for the lyric stage in 1929, writing eight numbers for the revue The House that Jack Built. In the same year, he presented his own play Symphony in Two Flats, which he took to New York the following year. It was followed by a successful Broadway production of his
1930s musicals
After beginning the 1930s with a series of non-musical plays – I Lived with You (1932),
Dominating the British musical theatre from the mid-1930s to the early 1950s, his shows were heavily influenced by the operettas that he had grown up with (he saw
Die lustige Witwe 27 times), but had a highly individual style of their own. Blending musicals with opera, operetta and both modern and classical dance, these shows were considered something of an anachronism in their own time, but that was part of their appeal.[3]
Another model was Coward's 1929 musical Bitter Sweet, which Novello called "a lovely, lovely thing ... sheer joy from beginning to end". That, too, was an old-fashioned musical, "so full of regret ... for a vanished kindly silly darling age".[31]
For all his four 1930s musicals, Novello wrote the book and music,
Second World War and last years
Novello presented only two new shows during the Second World War. Arc de Triomphe (1943), a musical vehicle for Mary Ellis, was only a modest success, but
Novello's last full-scale production in this style, King's Rhapsody (1949), was, in Webb's words, "a self-consciously romantic counter-blast to the modern musical: crown princes, ballrooms, royal yachts, beautiful princesses and a full-scale coronation".[3] After the rigours of war, this escapist entertainment had strong box-office appeal and ran for 841 performances.[37] The show starred Novello and the cast included Phyllis Dare, Zena Dare, Olive Gilbert and Bobbie Andrews. It was still running, at the Palace Theatre, when Novello's last show opened. This was Gay's the Word (1951). Novello had written no role for himself; the show starred the comedy actress Cicely Courtneidge and was a departure from his established pattern, balancing the contrasting styles of European operetta and post-war American musicals.[2] The Times commented that the show "cheerfully parodied the very Ruritanian romances to which he owed his most triumphant successes".[7]
Death and legacy
Novello died suddenly from a
Only a few weeks before Novello's death, Coward had written of him: "Theatre – good, bad and indifferent – is the love of his life. For him, other human endeavours are mere shadows. ... The reward of his work lies in the indisputable fact that whenever and wherever he appears the vast majority of the British public flock to see him."[5] The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians writes of Novello that he was "until the advent of Andrew Lloyd Webber, the 20th century's most consistently successful composer of British musicals".[3]
The
In 1993, the centenary of Novello's birth was marked by several celebratory shows around the UK, including one at the
Novello was portrayed in Robert Altman's 2001 film Gosford Park by Jeremy Northam, and several of his songs were used for the film's soundtrack, including "Waltz of My Heart", "And Her Mother Came Too", "I Can Give You the Starlight", "What a Duke Should Be", "Why Isn't It You?" and "The Land of Might-Have-Been".[citation needed] Jeremy Irvine played Novello in the 2021 Terence Davies film Benediction, about the life of his one-time lover, the war poet Siegfried Sassoon.[44]
Songs
Among Novello's well-known songs are "
In Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Webb writes that although Novello's oeuvre is generally thought of as "romantic" and "
Filmography
Actor
Year | Title | Role | Country |
---|---|---|---|
1920 | Miarka: The Daughter of the Bear
|
Ivor | France |
1921 | The Call of the Blood | Maurice Delarey | |
Carnival | Count Andrea Scipione | United Kingdom | |
1922 | The Bohemian Girl | Thaddeus | |
1923 | The White Rose | Joseph Beaugarde | United States |
Bonnie Prince Charlie | Prince Charles Stuart | United Kingdom | |
The Man Without Desire | Count Vittorio Dandolo | Germany / United Kingdom | |
1925 | The Rat | Pierre Boucheron, 'the Rat' | United Kingdom |
1926 | The Triumph of the Rat | ||
1927 | The Lodger | The Lodger | |
Downhill | Roddy Berwick | ||
1928 | The Constant Nymph | Lewis Dodd | |
The Vortex | Nicky Lancaster | ||
A South Sea Bubble | Vernon Winslow | ||
The Gallant Hussar | Lieutenant Stephen Alrik | Germany / United Kingdom | |
1929 | The Return of the Rat | Pierre Boucheron, 'the Rat' | United Kingdom |
1930 | Symphony in Two Flats | David Kennard | |
1931 | Once a Lady | Bennett Cloud | United States |
1932 | The Lodger | Michel Angeloff/"The Bosnian Murderer" | United Kingdom |
1933 | I Lived with You | Prince Felix Lenieff | |
Sleeping Car | Gaston | ||
1934 | Autumn Crocus | Andreas Steiner |
Writer
Year | Title | Country |
---|---|---|
1925 | The Rat | United Kingdom |
1926 | The Triumph of the Rat | |
1927 | Downhill | |
1929 | The Return of the Rat | |
1930 | Symphony in Two Flats | |
1932 | Tarzan the Ape Man | United States |
But the Flesh Is Weak | ||
The Lodger | United Kingdom | |
1933 | I Lived with You | |
1937 | Glamorous Night | |
The Rat | ||
1941 | Free and Easy | United States |
1950 | The Dancing Years | United Kingdom |
1955 | King's Rhapsody |
Notes
- ^ "Statue honours composer Novello", BBC News, 27 June 2009, accessed 26 September 2014.
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r Snelson, John. "Novello, Ivor (1893–1951)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition, January 2011, accessed 17 March 2011 (subscription required)
- ^ a b c d e f g h Webb, Paul. "Novello, Ivor", Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, accessed 17 March 2011 (subscription required)
- ^ MacQueen-Pope, p. 29
- ^ Trewin, J. C. "Popular Idol", The Times Literary Supplement, 18 May 1951, p. 304
- ^ a b c d e f Callow, Simon. "Ivor Novello, master of the musical", The Guardian, 3 August 2012
- ^ a b c d Obituary, The Times, 7 March 1951, p. 6
- ISBN 978-1847250032
- ^ MacQueen-Pope, p. 120
- Oxford Dictionary of National Biography gives the date as 1914, a fact confirmed by the British Library catalogue
- ^ MacQueen-Pope, pp. 57–62
- ^ "Theodore & Co", The Play Pictorial, September 1916, p. 50
- ^ Findon, B.W. "'Arlette' – An Operette in Three Acts", The Play Pictorial, November 1917, p. 82
- ^ Hoare (1995), p.55
- ^ Findon, B. W. "Who's Hooper?", The Play Pictorial, July 1919, p. 35
- ^ "The Golden Moth", The Times, 6 October 1921, p. 8
- ^ a b "Ivor Novello", Encyclopedia of Popular Music, Oxford Music Online, accessed 16 March 2011 (subscription required)
- ^ "The Theatres", The Times, 20 October 1921, p. 8
- ^ "Plays of the Year", The Play Pictorial, October 1922, p. 111
- ISBN 978-1421422824.
- ^ Roberts, p. 195
- ^ Duguid, Mark. "The Man Without Desire (1923)", BFI Screen Online, accessed 14 June 2017.
- ^ It was credited to the pseudonymous David L'Estrange, but was the work of Novello and his friend, the actress Constance Collier: see ODNB
- ^ "Duke of York's Theatre", The Times, 24 December 1926, p. 8
- ^ Hoare (1995), p.123
- ^ Hoare (1995), pp.187–88
- ^ "The Theatres. Sirocco to be Withdrawn", The Times, 12 December 1927, p. 12
- ISBN 978-0-7083-1953-6.
- ^ Macnab, Geoffrey. "The rise and fall of Ivor Novello", The Guardian, 10 January 2004, accessed 4 June 2020.
- ^ According to the ODNB, "he reputedly originated the line that gave rise to the now mythical if inaccurate 'Me Tarzan. You Jane' (originally – with appropriate pointing – 'Tarzan. Jane.')"
- ^ Letter from Novello to Coward, undated, in Day, p. 156
- ^ "Theatres", The Times, 2 May 1935, p. 12; and 18 July 1936, p. 12
- ^ "Drury Lane", The Times, 12 September 1936, p. 10; and Gaye, p. 1529
- ^ Gaye, p. 1530
- ^ MacQueen-Pope, p. 234. The offending fan, Dora Grace Constable, escaped with a £50 fine: see ODNB
- ^ Hoare (1995), p.349; Coward's modified sympathy was later echoed in Ewan MacColl's song "Ivor": see MacColl, Ewan. Bad Lads and Hard Cases, Riverside LP 1957
- ^ Gaye, p. 1533
- ISBN 0786479922
- ^ "Composer Left £160,000 Estate". The Mercury. Hobart, Tas. 9 June 1951. p. 8. Retrieved 10 July 2012 – via National Library of Australia.
- ISBN 9781427804150
- ^ "Ivor Novello plaque, Aldwych", Geograph.org, accessed 26 September 2014.
- ^ "Statue honours composer Novello", BBC News, 27 June 2009
- ^ "About us" Archived 10 March 2011 at the Wayback Machine, Redroofs Associates, accessed 16 March 2011.
- Left Lion.
- ^ 1917 mp3 recording of "Keep the home fires burning" sung by John McCormack, firstworldwar.com, accessed 20 November 2009.
References
- Day, Barry (ed). The Letters of Noël Coward. London: Methuen. (2007). ISBN 978-0-7136-8578-7.
- Gaye, Freda. Who's Who in the Theatre, fourteenth edition, 1967. London: Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons.
- ISBN 1-85619-265-2.
- MacQueen-Pope, W. J. Ivor: The Story of an Achievement. London: Hutchinson (1954)
- Roberts, John Stuart. Siegfried Sassoon, London: Metro Publishing (2005). ISBN 1-84358-138-8
Further reading
- ISBN 0-491-03385-0
- Noble, Peter (1951). Ivor Novello: Man of the Theatre. London: Falcon Press.
- Slattery-Christy, David. In Search of Ruritania: The Life and Times of Ivor Novello, Authorhouse, 2006 ISBN 1425949436
- Norton, Richard C., "Coward & Novello", Essay for the Operetta Research Center Amsterdam.
External links
- Ivor Novello at IMDb
- Ivor Novello at BBC Wales
- Ivor Novello at Theatricalia
- Ivor Novello at Virtual History
- The Ivor Novello Appreciation Bureau
- Ivor Novello at the BFI's Screenonline
- Ivor Novello on home video at Brenton Film
- Ivor Novello biography on BBC South East Wales
- Ivor Novello at the Internet Broadway Database
- Collections and biography at Victoria and Albert Museum
- Search Ivor Novello at University of Bristol Theatre Collection
- Works by Ivor Novello at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
- Portraits of Ivor Novello at the National Portrait Gallery, London
- Free scores by Ivor Novello at the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP)