1. Lesley Gore followed it up with ten further US Billboard top 40 hits including "Judy's Turn to Cry" and "You Don't Own Me".
23 Facts About Lesley Gore
1. 2.
Lesley Gore composed songs with her brother Michael Gore for the 1980 film Fame, which received an Academy Award Best Song nomination for "Out Here On My Own".
3.
Lesley Gore hosted several editions of the LGBT-oriented public television show In the Life on American TV in the 2000s.
4.
Gore was born Lesley Sue Goldstein in Brooklyn, New York City, into a middle-class Jewish family.
5.
Lesley Gore's father was the owner of Peter Pan, a children's swimwear and underwear manufacturer, and later became a leading brand licensing agent in the apparel industry.
6.
Lesley Gore was raised in Tenafly, New Jersey, and attended the Dwight School for Girls in nearby Englewood.
7.
Lesley Gore attended Sarah Lawrence College, graduating with a degree in American literature.
8.
Lesley Gore was discovered after her uncle gave Joe Glaser a tape of her singing that he forwarded to Irving Green, president of Mercury Records.
9.
Lesley Gore was given first shot at recording "A Groovy Kind of Love" by songwriters Carole Bayer and Toni Wine with a melody borrowed from a sonatina by Muzio Clementi, but Shelby Singleton, a producer for Mercury subsidiary Smash Records, refused to let Lesley Gore record a song with the word "groovy" in its lyrics.
10.
Lesley Gore recorded composer Marvin Hamlisch's first hit composition, "Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows", on May 21,1963, while "It's My Party" was climbing the charts.
11.
Lesley Gore performed on two consecutive episodes of the Batman television series, in which she guest-starred as Pussycat, one of Catwoman's minions.
12.
Lesley Gore performed "It's My Party" and "We Know We're in Love" 10 months earlier on the final episode of The Donna Reed Show, which aired on March 19,1966.
13.
Lesley Gore signed a contract with Mercury Records with a five-year term that carried her obligations to the company through the spring of 1968.
14.
Lesley Gore's first release under the label, "Why Doesn't Love Make Me Happy", was a moderate hit on the Adult Contemporary chart, but none of her other singles would prove to be successful.
15.
Lesley Gore left Crewe Records in 1971 when the label went bankrupt.
16.
In 1972, Lesley Gore signed with MoWest Records, a subsidiary of Motown, and in July of that year released her first studio album in five years, Someplace Else Now.
17.
Lesley Gore composed songs for the soundtrack of the 1980 film Fame, for which she received an Academy Award nomination for "Out Here on My Own," written with her brother, Michael Lesley Gore.
18.
Lesley Gore played concerts and appeared on television throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
19.
Lesley Gore co-wrote a song, "My Secret Love", for the 1996 film Grace of My Heart.
20.
The film includes a subplot about a young singer named Kelly Porter, who is based in part on Lesley Gore and is played by Bridget Fonda.
21.
Lesley Gore had known about her attraction to women from the time she was 20 and stated that although the music business was "totally homophobic", she never felt she had to pretend she was straight.
22.
Lesley Gore had been working on a memoir and a Broadway show based on her life when she died of lung cancer on February 16,2015, at the NYU Langone Medical Center in Manhattan, New York City, at the age of 68.
23.
Lesley Gore's papers were donated to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and became accessible to the public in 2022.