Broadway legend, CT resident Stephen Sondheim dead at 91
ROXBURY — Stephen Sondheim, the legendary Broadway composer and lyricist whose work spanned more than six decades and included “Sweeney Todd,” “Into the Woods” and “West Side Story,” died at his home in Roxbury Thursday night. He was 91.
Sondheim’s death was first reported by the New York Times Friday evening, citing his lawyer and friend, F. Richard Pappas, who said he died early Friday after celebrating Thanksgiving. The cause of death was not immediately known.
Roxbury fire officials independently confirmed Sondheim’s death to Hearst Connecticut Media.
Sondheim’s achievements included six of his plays winning Tony Awards, according to reporting by the Associated Press, a Pulitzer Prize for “Sunday in the Park,” an Academy Award for the song “Sooner or Later” from the film “Dick Tracy,” five Olivier Awards and the Presidential Medal of Honor. He also received a special Tony Award for lifetime achievement in 2008.
Memorials to Sondheim came pouring in on social media soon after the news broke.
“Stephen Sondheim was more than just a masterful musician, he was a person of passion who always sought to highlight the human experience in a unique way so we could better empathize with one another. His music and his art helped us grow and see beyond ourselves. Even if you weren’t a fan of musicals, his music influenced our culture and touched your life,” Gov. Ned Lamont said in a statement. “My condolences are with his family. We will miss him dearly.”
“Performing his work has been among the greatest privileges of my career. A devastating loss,” actress Anna Kendrick wrote on Twitter.
Author Neil Gaiman wrote that Sondheim wrote him “a wonderful permission letter” for Gaiman to use Sondheim’s song “Old Friends” in one of Gaiman’s works. “I avoided meeting him (failed only once) and refused dinner because I didn’t have many heroes. Now I’ve got one less. Thank you Stephen Sondheim so much,” Gaiman tweeted Friday.
Stephen Joshua Sondheim was born March 22, 1930, in Manhattan, according to The Times, to Herbert Sondheim, the owner of a dressmaking company and Etta Janet Fox. After his parents divorced when Stephen Sondheim was 10, he spent much of his youth with his mother. He went on to graduate from Williams College in 1950.
Sondheim met the person who would be his mentor through his mother’s friendship with Dorothy Hammerstein, wife of the lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II. Sondheim said Hammerstein taught him to write songs “for myself.”
“I wrote songs that imitated him, he said ‘no, write what you feel,’” Sondheim recalled in an interview with Stephen Colbert
“That was important because you would think that would be natural but it’s not, it’s not,” Sondheim said, “particularly if you think highly of the person that you’re imitating, which I did.”
Two of Sondheim’s early works — providing the lyrics for 1957’s “West Side Story” and 1959’s “Gypsy — would go on to be among the most well-known and lauded musicals of their time.
His career would go on to include more than a dozen plays, most of which he composed and wrote lyrics for, including “A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum” (1962), “Anyone Can Whistle” (1964), “Sweeney Todd” (1979) and “Into The Woods” (1987).
Sondheim also had a townhouse in Manhattan, according to his obituary in the Times, but had been spending more time at his home in Roxbury during the pandemic.