Global & World Music Stars Codexery

Ivor Novello

Welsh actor, dramatist, singer and composer; one of the most popular British entertainers of the first half of the 20th century.

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He wrote the wartime hit "Keep the Home Fires Burning" in 1914, which brought him early fame and fortune.[1] His later musicals, beginning with Glamorous Night in 1935, defined his legacy as a creator of lush, romantic stage works.[2]

Making and release

Novello was born David Ivor Davies in Cardiff to a rent collector father and a famous singing teacher mother.[3] He studied harmony and counterpoint with cathedral organist Herbert Brewer and won a scholarship to Magdalen College School in Oxford.[4][2] He wrote his first stage score for Theodore & Co in 1916, collaborating with the young Jerome Kern.[5] Novello also began a film career in 1920 when Swiss director Louis Mercanton cast him as the romantic lead in The Call of the Blood.[6][2]

He found little satisfying work there, writing dialogue for Tarzan the Ape Man, and called his Hollywood stint his "greatest failure"[7][8] Novello's last musical, Gay's the Word (1951), featured no role for himself and starred Cicely Courtneidge.[9] His 1935 musical Glamorous Night was the first of a series of enormously popular musicals; it ran at Drury Lane and then the London Coliseum.[10][11]

What the cited sources add

The same source states that film theorist Ivor Montagu was startled by the self-indulgence of Novello's original play for Downhill.[8] Macnab also notes that Novello's homosexuality was an open secret in theatrical circles.[8] The Chandry article from Left Lion confirms that Jeremy Irvine played Novello in the 2021 film Benediction.[12][13] The BFI entry for The Man Without Desire (1923) states that Novello's "other-worldly beauty and sexual ambiguity" made him ideally suited for his role in that film.[14]

References

  1. Wikipedia, "Ivor Novello" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Callow, Simon. "Ivor Novello, master of the musical", The Guardian, 3 August 2012; Grove Music Online states that the song dates from 1915, but the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography gives the date as 1914, a fact confirmed by the British (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org
  2. Callow, Simon. "Ivor Novello, master of the musical", The Guardian, 3 August 2012. facts only, no text reused. theguardian.com
  3. Wikipedia, "Ivor Novello" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Snelson, John. "Novello, Ivor (1893–1951)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition, January 2011, accessed 17 Ma; Webb, Paul. "Novello, Ivor", Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, accessed 17 March 2011; MacQueen-Pope, p. 29; Snelson, John. "Novello, Ivor (1893–1951)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition, January 2011, accessed 17 Ma; Trewin, J. C. "Popular Idol", The Times Literary Supplement, 18 May 1951, p. 304 (original not read by us en.wikipedia.org
  4. Wikipedia, "Ivor Novello" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Callow, Simon. "Ivor Novello, master of the musical", The Guardian, 3 August 2012 (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org
  5. Wikipedia, "Ivor Novello" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: "Theodore & Co", The Play Pictorial, September 1916, p. 50; Snelson, John. "Novello, Ivor (1893–1951)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition, January 2011, accessed 17 Ma; Findon, B.W. "'Arlette' – An Operette in Three Acts", The Play Pictorial, November 1917, p. 82; Snelson, John. "Novello, Ivor (1893–1951)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition, January 2011, accessed 17 Ma (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
  6. Wikipedia, "Ivor Novello" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Callow, Simon. "Ivor Novello, master of the musical", The Guardian, 3 August 2012; Snelson, John. "Novello, Ivor (1893–1951)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition, January 2011, accessed 17 Ma; Snelson, John. "Novello, Ivor (1893–1951)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition, January 2011, accessed 17 Ma (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org
  7. Wikipedia, "Ivor Novello" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: 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 p; Snelson, John. "Novello, Ivor (1893–1951)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition, January 2011, accessed 17 Ma (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
  8. Macnab, Geoffrey. "The rise and fall of Ivor Novello", The Guardian, 10 January 2004, accessed 4 June 2020.. facts only, no text reused. theguardian.com
  9. Wikipedia, "Ivor Novello" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Snelson, John. "Novello, Ivor (1893–1951)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition, January 2011, accessed 17 Ma; Obituary, The Times, 7 March 1951, p. 6 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
  10. Wikipedia, "Ivor Novello" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Callow, Simon. "Ivor Novello, master of the musical", The Guardian, 3 August 2012; Obituary, The Times, 7 March 1951, p. 6 (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org
  11. Wikipedia, "Ivor Novello" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: "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; Webb, Paul. "Novello, Ivor", Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, accessed 17 March 2011; Gaye, p. 1530; Webb, Paul. "Novello, Ivor", Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, accessed 17 March 2011 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
  12. Chandry, "Tom Blyth on His Journey from the TV Workshop to HBO's The Gilded Age", Left Lion, 23 February 2021. facts only, no text reused. leftlion.co.uk
  13. Wikipedia, "Ivor Novello" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Chandry, "Tom Blyth on His Journey from the TV Workshop to HBO's The Gilded Age", Left Lion, 23 February 2021 (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org
  14. Duguid, Mark. "The Man Without Desire (1923)", BFI Screen Online, accessed 14 June 2017.. facts only, no text reused. screenonline.org.uk

Each numbered sentence above was checked against the source it cites before publication. Sentences citing Wikipedia adapt text from the English Wikipedia article Ivor Novello (contributors), used under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is available under the same licence. Other sources were used for facts only; no text or images are copied from them.

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Compiled from Wikipedia and the sources listed below. Text from Wikipedia is available under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is adapted from it.

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