Prolific composer shrugged off My Old Man’s a Dustman to win two Oscars
It would be fair to say that writing Lonnie Donegan’s My Old Man’s a Dustman was not the most prestigious start to Leslie Bricusse’s career. He knew it, too, and wisely concealed his culpability behind the pseudonym Beverly Thorn. ‘‘I was worried about it being a bit downmarket,’’ he admitted.
The song gave him his first No 1 in 1960, but his subsequent credits required no such coyness. Within three years he had won a Grammy for What Kind of Fool Am I, sung by Sammy Davis Jr, who went on to record more than 60 of his songs. Four years later came Talk to the Animals, sung by Rex Harrison in the 1967 film Dr
Dolittle, which won Bricusse an
Academy Award songwriter and lyricist
for best original b January 29, 1931
song. d October 19, 2021
He and Cyril
Ornadel came up with If I Ruled the World for Harry Secombe. Working in tandem with Anthony Newley, he wrote Feeling Good,
memorably sung by Nina Simone, and Tony Bennett’s hit Who Can I Turn To?.
He and Newley teamed up with John Barry to co-write the theme to the Bond movie Goldfinger, and Bricusse worked with Barry again on You Only Live Twice. Other composers who turned to Bricusse as a collaborator included John Williams, Henry Mancini, Andrew Lloyd Webber and, he liked to joke, Tchaikovsky, whose Nutcracker Suite
he adapted into a song cycle.
Proudly ‘‘old school’’, Bricusse combined Tin Pan Alley immediacy with the sophistication of Broadway show tunes and demanded that his songs were sung in traditional style without any hint of rock’n’roll contagion. However, he did not refuse the royalties when Richard Branson spent £6 million on a Virgin Atlantic advert featuring a version of Feeling Good by the British stadium rockers Muse.
Resisting the urge to self-deprecate, Bricusse estimated he wrote more than 1000 songs, the majority of them for stage musicals or films, ranging from Can You Read My Mind? (from the 1978 movie Superman) to Christmas at Hogwarts for Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2001).
He also collaborated with Newley for the 1971 movie Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, which included Candyman and Pure Imagination. Of the films he worked on, his favourite was Victor/victoria (1982), starring Julie Andrews, which gave him his second Academy Award with co-writer Henry Mancini. There were eight other Oscar nominations and he reckoned two wins out of 10 was ‘‘about par’’.
His body of work earned him a place in the American Songwriters’ Hall of Fame: he was only the fourth Englishman to be so honoured after Noel Coward, John Lennon and Paul Mccartney. It also earned him a glittering lifestyle of champagne-fuelled partying in Beverly Hills, Palm Springs, Gstaad, the Caribbean and the Cote d’azur – a ‘‘sybaritic, hedonistic heaven’’, which he chronicled in his 2015 memoir Pure Imagination. In the book’s introduction he promised to drop names ‘‘like fragrant rose petals’’. He did not disappoint, with tales of famous friends such as Frank Sinatra, Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Caine and Elton John. One chapter found him introducing the Beatles to Stephen Sondheim and by the next he was lying drunk with Paul Newman in the middle of New York’s 58th St at 5 o’clock in the morning ‘‘because Paul said it was a good place to watch the sunrise’’.
Another friend was the painter Marc Chagall, a neighbour on the French Riviera. Bricusse claimed he bought so many of Chagall’s now priceless paintings that he ‘‘didn’t have an inch of wall space’’ to spare.
There was also a home in the Hollywood hills and a Thames-side apartment in London, which he shared with his wife Evie, whom he married in 1958. Better known as the actress Yvonne Romain, she survives him with their son Adam.
Leslie Bricusse grew up in a modest home in Pinner, now in northwest London. He joked that there was showbusiness blood in the family as his mother scrubbed the steps at the Apollo Theatre.
He arrived in Hollywood in 1965 and was hired to write both the screenplay and songs for Dr Dolittle, after Alan Lerner had been fired. ‘‘As the audition piece, I wrote the song Talk to the Animals, so I’m the first person to win an Oscar on his first day in Hollywood,’’ he never tired of telling people.
However, he had enormous trouble persuading Rex Harrison to sing it. The star told him the song was ridiculous and complained about the rhyming of ‘‘rhinoceros’’ with ‘‘of course-eros’’.
‘‘We’re playing with words,’’ Bricusse told him. ‘‘Oh, God, protect me from f...ing puns,’’ Harrison snorted. ‘‘Silly schoolboy stuff!’’
Harrison resigned in disgust but was cajoled into returning and reluctantly agreed to sing Talk to the Animals.
Bricusse was still working as he approached his 90s, when plans to stage his musical about the life of Sammy Davis Jr had to be put on hold in 2020 due to the pandemic. –