36 Facts About Ivor Novello

Ivor Novello was born into a musical family, and his first successes were as a songwriter.

Ivor Novello wrote his musicals in the style of operetta and often composed his music to the libretti of Christopher Hassall.

Ivor Novello starred in two silent films directed by Alfred Hitchcock, The Lodger and Downhill.

Ivor 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.

Ivor Novello continued to write for film, but in his later career his biggest successes were with stage musicals: Perchance to Dream, King's Rhapsody and Gay's the Word.

The Ivor Novello Awards were named after him in 1955.

Ivor Novello's 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.

Ivor Novello was educated privately in Cardiff and then in Gloucester, where he studied harmony and counterpoint with Herbert Brewer, the cathedral organist.

Ivor Novello later said that this prolonged youthful exposure to early sacred choral music had turned his tastes, in reaction, to lush romantic music.

Ivor Novello adopted his mother's middle name, "Novello", as his professional surname, although he did not change it legally until 1927.

In 1914, at the start of the First World War, Ivor Novello wrote "Keep the Home Fires Burning", a song that expressed the feelings of innumerable families sundered by the war.

Ivor Novello composed the music for the song to a lyric by the American Lena Guilbert Ford, and it became a huge popular success, bringing Ivor Novello money and fame at the age of 21.

Ivor Novello avoided enlistment until June 1916, when he reported to a Royal Naval Air Service training depot as a probationary flight sub-lieutenant.

Ivor Novello continued to write songs while serving in the RNAS.

Coward, six years Ivor Novello's junior, was deeply envious of Ivor Novello's effortless glamour.

Ivor Novello 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".

In 1918 and after the war, Ivor Novello continued to write successfully for musical comedy and revue.

Ivor Novello made his first British film, Carnival, the following year.

Ivor Novello made his stage debut in 1921 in Deburau by Sacha Guitry, and, among other stage engagements in the next years, he played Bingley in a charity adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.

At about this time, Ivor Novello had an affair with the writer Siegfried Sassoon; it was short-lived, but in the words of Sassoon's biographer John Stuart Roberts, Ivor Novello "was a consummate flirt who collected lovers as he gathered lilacs".

Ivor Novello next co-wrote, produced and starred in the successful 1924 play The Rat.

Coward had by now caught up to Ivor Novello professionally, despite a joint disaster when Ivor Novello starred in Coward's play Sirocco in 1927, which was a debacle, and closed within a month of opening.

In 1928 Ivor Novello starred in the silent adaptation of Coward's much more successful The Vortex, and made his last silent film, A South Sea Bubble.

Ivor Novello returned to composing for the lyric stage in 1929, writing eight numbers for the revue The House that Jack Built.

Ivor Novello accepted a contract to write for and appear in MGM films.

Ivor Novello found little to do in Hollywood beyond writing the dialogue for Tarzan the Ape Man.

The Times considered that it was for these that Ivor Novello would be popularly remembered.

Paul Webb, in the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, writes that Ivor Novello's show saved the fortunes of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane:.

Ivor Novello presented only two new shows during the Second World War.

Not everybody was supportive; Coward's sympathy was limited: "He's been fighting like a steer to keep going as before the war and hasn't done a thing for the general effort", but when Ivor Novello returned to The Dancing Years after his release, he received "a rapturous ovation" on his first entrance.

Ivor 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.

Ivor Novello died suddenly from a coronary thrombosis at the age of 58, a few hours after completing a performance of King's Rhapsody.

In 1993, the centenary of Ivor Novello's birth was marked by several celebratory shows around the UK, including one at the Players Theatre in London.

In 2005, the Strand Theatre, above which Ivor Novello lived for many years, was renamed the Ivor Novello Theatre, with a plaque in his honour set at the entrance.

On 27 June 2009, a statue of Ivor Novello was unveiled outside the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff Bay.

Redroofs was sold after Ivor Novello's death, and is a theatre training school.