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• 
  

• 
  Broadway theatre
  Broadway theatre, commonly called simply Broadway, refers to theatrical performances presented in one of the 40 professional theatres with 500 or more seats located in the Theatre District centered along Broadway, and in Lincoln Center, in Manhattan in New York City. Along with London's West End theatre, Broadway theatre is widely considered to represent the highest level of commercial theatre in the English-speaking world.
  The Broadway theatre district is a popular tourist attraction in New York. According to The Broadway League, Broadway shows sold approximately $1.081 billion worth of tickets in calendar year 2011, compared with $1.037 billion for 2010. Attendance in 2011 was 12.13 million.
  New York did not have a significant theatre presence until about 1750, when actor-managers Walter Murray and Thomas Kean established a resident theatre company at the Theatre on Nassau Street, which held about 280 people. They presented Shakespeare plays and ballad operas such as The Beggar's Opera. In 1752, William Hallam sent a company of twelve actors from Britain to the colonies with his brother Lewis as their manager. They established a theatre in Williamsburg, Virginia and opened with The Merchant of Venice and The Anatomist. The company moved to New York in the summer of 1753, performing ballad operas and ballad-farces like Damon and Phillida. The Revolutionary War suspended theatre in New York, but thereafter theatre resumed in 1798, the year the 2,000-seat Park Theatre was built on Chatham Street (now called Park Row). The Bowery Theatre opened in 1826, followed by others. Blackface minstrel shows, a distinctly American form of entertainment, became popular in the 1830s, and especially so with the arrival of the Virginia Minstrels in the 1840s.
  
  wn.com/Broadway_theatre
• 
  New York City
  New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. The city is referred to as New York City or The City of New York to distinguish it from the State of New York, of which it is a part. As a global power city, New York exerts a significant impact upon commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and entertainment. The home of the United Nations Headquarters, New York is an important center for international diplomacy and has been described as the cultural capital of the world.
  Located on one of the world's largest natural harbors, New York City consists of five boroughs, each of which comprises a state county. The five boroughs—The Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island—were consolidated into a single city in 1898. With a Census-estimated 2011 population of 8,244,910 distributed over a land area of just 305 square miles (790 km²), New York is the most densely populated major city in the United States. As many as 800 languages are spoken in New York, making it the most linguistically diverse city in the world. The New York City Metropolitan Area's population is the United States' largest, with 18.9 million people distributed over 6,720 square miles (17,400 km²), and is also part of the most populous combined statistical area in the United States, containing 22.1 million people as of the 2010 Census.
  
  wn.com/New_York_City
• 
  United Kingdom
  The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (commonly known as the United Kingdom, the UK, or Britain) is a sovereign state located off the north-western coast of continental Europe. The country includes the island of Great Britain, the north-eastern part of the island of Ireland and many smaller islands. Northern Ireland is the only part of the UK that shares a land border with another sovereign state—the Republic of Ireland. Apart from this land border the UK is surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, the North Sea, the English Channel and the Irish Sea.
  The United Kingdom is a unitary state governed under a constitutional monarchy and a parliamentary system, with its seat of government in the capital city of London. It is a country in its own right and consists of four countries: England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. There are three devolved administrations, each with varying powers, based in Belfast, Edinburgh and Cardiff, the capitals of Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Associated with the UK, but not constitutionally part of it, are three Crown Dependencies. The United Kingdom has fourteen overseas territories. These are remnants of the British Empire which, at its height in 1922, encompassed almost a quarter of the world's land surface and was the largest empire in history. British influence can still be observed in the language, culture and legal systems of many of its former territories.
  
  wn.com/United_Kingdom
• 
  United States
  The United States of America (commonly abbreviated to the United States, the U.S., the USA, America, and the States) is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district. The country is situated mostly in central North America, where its forty-eight contiguous states and Washington, D.C., the capital district, lie between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, bordered by Canada to the north and Mexico to the south. The state of Alaska is in the northwest of the continent, with Canada to the east and Russia to the west, across the Bering Strait. The state of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific. The country also possesses several territories in the Pacific and Caribbean.
  At 3.79 million square miles (9.83 million km²) and with over 312 million people, the United States is the third or fourth largest country by total area, and the third largest by both land area and population. It is one of the world's most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, the product of large-scale immigration from many countries. The U.S. economy is the world's largest national economy, with an estimated 2011 GDP of $15.1 trillion (22% of nominal global GDP and over 19% of global GDP at purchasing-power parity). Per capita income is the world's sixth-highest.
  
  wn.com/United_States
• 
  Vienna
  Vienna ( /viːˈɛnə/; German:  Wien (help·info) [viːn]) is the capital and largest city of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million (2.4 million within the metropolitan area, more than 25% of Austria's population), and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre. It is the 9th-largest city by population in the European Union. Until the beginning of the 20th century it was the largest German speaking city in the world, and before the first world war and the splitting of the Austro-Hungarian empire the city had 2 million inhabitants. Vienna is host to many major international organizations, including the United Nations and OPEC. The city lies in the east of Austria and is close to the borders of the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. These regions work together in a European Centrope border region. Along with nearby Bratislava, Vienna forms a metropolitan region with 3 million inhabitants. In 2001, the city centre was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
  
  wn.com/Vienna

• Adolph Green
  Adolph Green (December 2, 1914  – October 23, 2002) was an American lyricist and playwright who, with long-time collaborator Betty Comden, penned the screenplays and songs for some of the most beloved movie musicals, particularly as part of Arthur Freed's production unit at MGM, during the genre's heyday. Many people thought the pair were married; they were not, but they shared a unique comic genius and sophisticated wit that enabled them to forge a six-decade-long partnership that produced some of Hollywood and Broadway's greatest hits.
  Green was born in The Bronx to Hungarian-Jewish immigrants Daniel and Helen Weiss Green. After high school, he worked as a runner on Wall Street while he tried to make it as an actor. He met Comden through mutual friends in 1938 while she was studying drama at New York University. They formed a troupe called the Revuers, which performed at the Village Vanguard, a club in Greenwich Village. Among the members of the company was a young comedian named Judy Tuvim, who later changed her name to Judy Holliday, and Green's good friend, a young musician named Leonard Bernstein, frequently accompanied them on the piano. The act's success earned them a movie offer and the Revuers traveled west in hopes of finding fame in Greenwich Village, a 1944 movie starring Carmen Miranda and Don Ameche, but their roles were so small they barely were noticed, and they quickly returned to New York.
  
  wn.com/Adolph_Green
• Al Kasha
  Al Kasha (born 22 January 1937) is a Brooklyn–born composer, songwriter and arranger, as well as businessman. He is most noted for his years of collaboration with songwriter Joel Hirschhorn. The two wrote and collaborated many successful songs for many musical groups such as The Peppermint Rainbow's "Will You Be Staying After Sunday".
  The songwriting duo won two Oscars for Best Song, "The Morning After" from The Poseidon Adventure in 1972 and "We May Never Love Like This Again" from The Towering Inferno in 1974.
  Along with Hirshhorn, Kasha also received two Tony nominations for Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and Copperfield, two Grammy nominations and an Emmy, as well as four Golden Globe nominations and a People's Choice award. They also composed the theme song to the short-lived 1990s game show The Challengers.
  Al is currently married to Ceil Kasha who handles Donna Summer's business affairs.
  
  wn.com/Al_Kasha
• Alan Bergman
  Alan Bergman (born September 11, 1925) is an American lyricist and songwriter.
  Born in Brooklyn, New York, he studied at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and UCLA. His involvement in the entertainment industry began in the early 1950s as a director of children's television shows. He and his wife Marilyn Bergman, whom he married in 1958, were born in the same hospital and raised in the same Brooklyn neighborhood, but did not meet until each had relocated to Los Angeles. Together they have written the music and lyrics for numerous television shows, films, and stage musicals.
  In 1983, the couple became the first songwriters ever to have written three of the five tunes nominated for an Academy Award for Best Song - "How Do You Keep the Music Playing?" from Best Friends, "It Might Be You" from Tootsie (with Dave Grusin), and "If We Were in Love" from Yes, Giorgio (with John Williams); "Up Where We Belong" from "An Officer and a Gentleman" won that year.They also wrote the popular theme song And Then There's Maude for the hit Norman Lear television series Maude .
  
  wn.com/Alan_Bergman
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  Albert Einstein
  Albert Einstein ( /ˈælbərt ˈaɪnstaɪn/; German: [ˈalbɐt ˈaɪnʃtaɪn] ( listen); 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German theoretical physicist who developed the theory of general relativity, effecting a revolution in physics. For this achievement, Einstein is often regarded as the father of modern physics. While best known for his mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc² (which has been dubbed "the world's most famous equation"), he received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect". The latter was pivotal in establishing quantum theory within physics.
  Near the beginning of his career, Einstein thought that Newtonian mechanics was no longer enough to reconcile the laws of classical mechanics with the laws of the electromagnetic field. This led to the development of his special theory of relativity. He realized, however, that the principle of relativity could also be extended to gravitational fields, and with his subsequent theory of gravitation in 1916, he published a paper on the general theory of relativity. He continued to deal with problems of statistical mechanics and quantum theory, which led to his explanations of particle theory and the motion of molecules. He also investigated the thermal properties of light which laid the foundation of the photon theory of light. In 1917, Einstein applied the general theory of relativity to model the structure of the universe as a whole.
  
  wn.com/Albert_Einstein
• Alfred Uhry
  Alfred Fox Uhry (born December 3, 1936) is an American playwright, screenwriter, and member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He is one of very few writers to receive an Academy Award, Tony Award (2) and the Pulitzer Prize for dramatic writing.
  Uhry was born in Atlanta, Georgia, the son of Ralph K., a furniture designer and artist, and Alene Fox, a social worker, married as Uhry. He was born into a Jewish family. Uhry graduated from Druid Hills High School in 1954 and subsequently graduated from Brown University where he wrote two original musicals with Brownbrokers. Druid Hills High School's Uhry Theater is named in honor of Uhry. During his first years in New York City, learning the craft of lyric-writing, Uhry received a stipend from Frank Loesser; after his eventual success, Uhry often praised Loesser's generosity and encouragement. Uhry is married to Joanna Kellogg. They have four daughters and live in New York.
  Uhry's early work for the stage was as a lyricist and librettist for a number of commercially unsuccessful musicals, including America's Sweetheart and a revival of Little Johnny Jones starring Donny Osmond. His first collaboration with Robert Waldman was the disastrous 1968 musical Here's Where I Belong, which closed after one performance. They had considerably better success with The Robber Bridegroom, which was mounted on Broadway in both 1975 and 1976, enjoyed a year-long national tour, and garnered Uhry his first Tony nomination.
  
  wn.com/Alfred_Uhry
• 
  Alicia Keys
  Alicia Augello Cook (born January 25, 1981), better known by her stage name Alicia Keys, is an American R&B singer-songwriter, record producer, and actress. Keys was raised by a single mother in the Hell's Kitchen area of Manhattan in New York City. At age seven, Keys began playing the piano. She attended Professional Performing Arts School and graduated at 16 as valedictorian. Keys released her debut album with J Records, having had previous record deals first with Columbia and then Arista Records.
  Keys' debut album, Songs in A Minor, was a commercial success, selling over 12 million copies worldwide. She became the best-selling new artist and best-selling R&B artist of 2001. The album earned Keys five Grammy Awards in 2002, including Best New Artist and Song of the Year for "Fallin'". Her second studio album, The Diary of Alicia Keys, was released in 2003 and was also another success worldwide, selling eight million copies. The album garnered her an additional four Grammy Awards in 2005. Later that year, she released her first live album, Unplugged, which debuted at number one in the United States. She became the first female to have an MTV Unplugged album to debut at number one and the highest since Nirvana in 1994.
  
  wn.com/Alicia_Keys
• Amanda McBroom
  Amanda McBroom (born August 9, 1947) is an American singer, songwriter actress and cabaret performer. Notable among the songs she has written is "The Rose", which Bette Midler sang in the film of the same name, and which has been covered by many other recording artists. McBroom is also known for her collaborations as lyricist with songwriter Michele Brourman, including some of the songs in the The Land Before Time film series, Balto II: Wolf Quest, and the musical Dangerous Beauty based on the film of the same name, which was scheduled to have its world premiere at the Pasadena Playhouse in February 2011.
  McBroom starred in the New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco and European productions of Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, and made her Broadway debut in the Cy Coleman and Dorothy Fields musical Seesaw.
  As an actress, McBroom has had guest-starring or recurring roles on such television series as Starsky and Hutch, Star Trek: The Next Generation ("The Measure of a Man"), Hart to Hart, Taxi, Charlie's Angels, Remington Steele, Hawaii Five-O, Magnum, P.I., M*A*S*H, Lou Grant, Love, American Style and Gunsmoke to her credit. She has also worked as a voice actress for children's cartoon shows, including Wildfire, The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang, Challenge of the GoBots, The Smurfs, Super Friends and The Richie Rich/Scooby-Doo Show and Scrappy Too!
  
  wn.com/Amanda_McBroom
• 
  Amy Winehouse
  Amy Jade Winehouse (14 September 1983 – 23 July 2011) was an English singer and songwriter known for her powerful deep contralto vocals and her eclectic mix of musical genres including R&B, soul and jazz. Winehouse's 2003 debut album, Frank, was critically successful in the UK and was nominated for the Mercury Prize. Her 2006 follow-up album, Back to Black, led to six Grammy Award nominations and five wins, tying the then record for the most wins by a female artist in a single night, and made Winehouse the first British female to win five Grammys, including three of the "Big Four": Best New Artist, Record of the Year and Song of the Year.
  In 2007 she won a Brit Award for Best British Female Artist; she had also been nominated for Best British Album. She won the Ivor Novello Award three times: once in 2004 for Best Contemporary Song (musically and lyrically) for "Stronger Than Me", once in 2007 for Best Contemporary Song for "Rehab", and once in 2008 for Best Song Musically and Lyrically for "Love Is a Losing Game".
  
  wn.com/Amy_Winehouse
• Andrew Lippa
  Andrew Lippa (December 22, 1964) is an American composer, lyricist, book writer, performer, and producer. He is a resident artist at the Ars Nova Theater in New York City.
  Lippa was born in Leeds, England. to English parents. He emigrated to the US in October, 1967 and grew up in Oak Park, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit. He attended Oak Park High School in Oak Park, Michigan. While at Michigan, Lippa studied vocal performance but eventually transferred into music education and received his bachelor’s degree in music education. After graduating from the University of Michigan, In 1987 Lippa moved to New York City and became a middle school music teacher at Columbia Grammar and Prep School (CGPS) on the Upper West Side. He was promoted his second year at (CGPS) to dean of 7th and 8th grade students – an assistant principal position – and held that post, in addition to teaching music, until June 1991. In 1988 Lippa was accepted into the celebrated BMI/Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop as a composer. There he met his future collaborator Tom Greenwald (John & Jen) He later pursued a music career.
  
  wn.com/Andrew_Lippa
• 
  Andrew Lloyd Webber
  Andrew Lloyd Webber, Baron Lloyd-Webber Kt. (born 22 March 1948) is an English composer and impresario of musical theatre.
  Lloyd Webber has achieved great popular success in musical theatre. Several of his musicals have run for more than a decade both in the West End and on Broadway. He has composed 13 musicals, a song cycle, a set of variations, two film scores, and a Latin Requiem Mass. He has also gained a number of honours, including a knighthood in 1992, followed by a peerage from the British Government for services to Music, seven Tony Awards, three Grammy Awards, an Academy Award, fourteen Ivor Novello Awards, seven Olivier Awards, a Golden Globe Award, and the Kennedy Center Honors in 2006.
  Several of his songs have been widely recorded and were hits outside of their parent musicals, notably "The Music of the Night" from The Phantom of the Opera, "I Don't Know How to Love Him" from Jesus Christ Superstar, "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina" and "You Must Love Me" from Evita, "Any Dream Will Do" from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and "Memory" from Cats.
  
  wn.com/Andrew_Lloyd_Webber
• André Previn
  André George Previn, KBE (born Andreas Ludwig Priwin; April 6, 1929) is a German-American pianist, conductor, and composer. He is considered one of the most versatile musicians in the world and is the winner of four Academy Awards for his film work and ten Grammy Awards for his recordings.
  Previn was born in Berlin, Germany, the son of Charlotte (née Epstein) and Jack Previn, who was a lawyer, judge, and music teacher. He is said to be "a distant relative of" the composer Gustav Mahler. However, In a pre-concert public interview at the Lincoln Center, in May 2012, Previn laughed at the suggestion that he is related to Mahler. The year of his birth is uncertain. Whilst most published reports give 1929, Previn himself has stated that 1930 is his birth year. This situation is a consequence of his the family losing Previn's birth certificate when they left Germany in 1938.^{[citation needed]} His elder brother was director Steve Previn.^{[citation needed]} The Previn family, which was Jewish,^{[citation needed]} emigrated to the United States in 1939 to escape the Nazi regime in Germany.^{[citation needed]}
  
  wn.com/André_Previn
• 
  August Wilson
  August Wilson (April 27, 1945 – October 2, 2005) was an American playwright whose work included a series of ten plays, The Pittsburgh Cycle, for which he received two Pulitzer Prizes for Drama. Each is set in a different decade, depicting the comic and tragic aspects of the African-American experience in the twentieth century.
  Wilson's maternal grandmother walked from North Carolina to Pennsylvania in search of a better life. Wilson was born Frederick August Kittel, Jr. in the Hill District of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the fourth of six children, to Sudeten-German immigrant baker/pastry cook, Frederick August Kittel, Sr. and Daisy Wilson, an African American cleaning woman, from North Carolina. Wilson's mother raised the children alone until he was five in a two-room apartment above a grocery store at 1727 Bedford Avenue; his father was mostly absent from his childhood. Wilson would go on to write under his mother's surname. The economically depressed neighborhood in which he was raised was inhabited predominantly by black Americans, and Jewish and Italian immigrants. Wilson's mother divorced and married David Bedford in the 1950s and the family moved from the Hill District to the then predominantly white working class neighborhood of Hazelwood, where they encountered racial hostility; bricks were thrown through a window at their new home. They were soon forced out of their house and on to their next home.
  
  wn.com/August_Wilson
• 
  Barbra Streisand
  Barbra Joan Streisand (/ˈstraɪsænd/; born April 24, 1942) is an American singer, actress, writer, film producer and director. She has won two Academy Awards, eight Grammy Awards, five Emmy Awards including one Daytime Emmy, a Special Tony Award, an American Film Institute award, a Peabody Award, and is one of the few entertainers who have won an Oscar, Emmy, Grammy, and Tony Award.
  She is one of the most commercially and critically successful entertainers in modern entertainment history, with more than 71.5 million albums shipped in the United States and 140 million albums sold worldwide. She is the best-selling female artist on the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) Top Selling Artists list, the only female recording artist in the top ten, and the only artist outside of the rock and roll genre. Along with Frank Sinatra, Cher, and Shirley Jones, she shares the distinction of being awarded an acting Oscar and also recording a number-one single on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart.
  
  wn.com/Barbra_Streisand
• Beth Henley
  Elizabeth Becker "Beth" Henley (born May 8, 1952) is an American dramatist and actress. She writes primarily about women's issues and family in the Southern United States. She is also a screenwriter who has written many film adaptations of her plays. She is known for her intertwining comic and serious moments in her pieces.
  Her most famous play, Crimes of the Heart (1978), was her first produced professionally. It opened at the Actors Theatre of Louisville and then to the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York City. The play won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama (1981), as well as the award for Best American Play of 1981 from the New York Drama Critics' Circle. The play also earned Henley a nomination for a Tony Award, and her screenplay adaptation for the 1986 film of the same name was nominated for an Oscar as Best Adapted Screenplay.
  Henley adapted her 1984 play, The Miss Firecracker Contest, into a 1989 film starring Holly Hunter entitled Miss Firecracker. Henley's play Ridiculous Fraud was produced at the McCarter Theatre in 2006, and her play Family Week was produced at MCC Theater in 2010, directed by Jonathan Demme.
  
  wn.com/Beth_Henley
• 
  Bette Midler
  Bette Midler (born December 1, 1945) is an American singer, actress, and comedian, also known by her informal stage name, The Divine Miss M. She became famous as a cabaret and concert headliner, and went on to star in successful and acclaimed films such as The Rose, Ruthless People, Beaches, and For The Boys. During her more than forty-year career, Midler has been nominated for two Academy Awards, and won three Grammy Awards, four Golden Globes, three Emmy Awards, and a special Tony Award. She has sold over 30 million albums worldwide. Her voice type is categorized as deep mezzo soprano.
  Midler was born in Honolulu, Hawaii. Her parents moved from Paterson, New Jersey to Honolulu before she was born, and hers was one of the few Jewish families in a mostly Asian neighborhood. Her mother, Ruth (née Schindel), was a seamstress and housewife, and her father, Fred Midler, worked at a Navy base in Hawaii as a painter. She was named after actress Bette Davis, though Davis pronounced her first name in two syllables, and Midler uses one, /ˈbɛt/. She was raised in Aiea and attended Radford High School, in Honolulu. She was voted "Most Talkative" in the 1961 school Hoss Election, and in her Senior Year (Class of 1963), "Most Dramatic". Midler majored in drama at the University of Hawaii, but left after three semesters. She earned money in the 1966 film Hawaii as an extra, playing an uncredited seasick passenger named Miss David Buff.
  
  wn.com/Bette_Midler
• Betty Box
  Betty Evelyn Box (25 September 1915 - 15 January 1999) was a prolific British film producer. Usually credited as Betty E. Box, she is considered one of the best of her generation, with a flair for making genuinely popular British films.
  Born in Beckenham, Kent, she entered the motion picture industry in 1942, joining her brother Sydney Box and his wife Muriel at Verity Films, where she helped produce more than 200 wartime propaganda shorts. Following World War II, she made an easy transition to feature films, beginning with The Years Between in 1946. When her brother assumed control of Gainsborough Pictures that year, he named her Head of Production at the Poole Street, Hoxton studio, where she produced ten films during the next two years. While tight budgets and shooting schedules compromised the quality of some of them, others - such as When the Bough Breaks (1947) - proved to be among the most politically interesting films of the period. She was also known for the trio of popular Huggetts films, starting with Here Come the Huggetts in 1948 and followed by Vote for Huggett and The Huggetts Abroad in 1949.
  
  wn.com/Betty_Box
• Betty Comden
  Betty Comden (May 3, 1917 – November 23, 2006) was one-half of the musical-comedy duo Comden and Green, who provided lyrics, libretti, and screenplays to some of the most beloved and successful Hollywood musicals and Broadway shows of the mid-20th century. Her writing partnership with Adolph Green lasted for six decades, during which time they collaborated with other leading entertainment figures such as the famed "Freed Unit" at MGM, Jule Styne and Leonard Bernstein.
  Betty Comden was born Basya Cohen in New York City, attended Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, and studied drama at New York University. In 1938, mutual friends introduced her to Adolph Green, an aspiring actor. Along with the young Judy Holliday and Leonard Bernstein, Comden and Green formed a troupe called the Revuers, which performed at the Village Vanguard, a club in Greenwich Village. Due to the act's success, the Revuers appeared in the 1944 film Greenwich Village, but their roles were so small they barely were noticed, and they quickly returned to New York.
  
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  Billy Joel
  William Martin "Billy" Joel (born May 9, 1949) is an American pianist, singer-songwriter, and composer. Since releasing his first hit song, "Piano Man," in 1973, Joel has become the sixth best-selling recording artist and the third best-selling solo artist in the United States, according to the RIAA.
  Joel had Top 40 hits in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, achieving 33 Top 40 hits in the United States, all of which he wrote himself. He is also a six-time Grammy Award winner, a 23-time Grammy nominee and has sold over 150 million records worldwide. He was inducted into the Songwriter's Hall of Fame (1992), the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1999), the Long Island Music Hall of Fame (2006), and the Hit Parade Hall of Fame (2009). In 2008, Billboard magazine released a list of the Hot 100 All-Time Top Artists to celebrate the US singles chart's 50th anniversary, with Billy Joel positioned at No. 23. With the exception of the 2007 songs "All My Life" and "Christmas in Fallujah," Joel stopped recording pop/rock material after 1993's River of Dreams, but he continued to tour extensively until 2010.
  
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  Billy Wilder
  Billy Wilder (22 June 1906 – 27 March 2002) was an Austro-Hungarian born American filmmaker, screenwriter, producer, artist, and journalist, whose career spanned more than 50 years and 60 films. He is regarded as one of the most brilliant and versatile filmmakers of Hollywood's golden age. Wilder is one of only five people to have won Academy Awards as producer, director, and writer for the same film (The Apartment).
  Wilder became a screenwriter in the late 1920s while living in Berlin. After the rise of Nazi Party, Wilder, who was Jewish, left for Paris, where he made his directorial debut. He relocated to Hollywood in 1933, and in 1939 he had a hit when he co-wrote the screenplay to the screwball comedy Ninotchka. Wilder established his directorial reputation after helming Double Indemnity (1944), a film noir he co-wrote with mystery novelist Raymond Chandler. Wilder earned the Best Director and Best Screenplay Academy Awards for the adaptation of a Charles R. Jackson story The Lost Weekend, about alcoholism. In 1950, Wilder co-wrote and directed the critically acclaimed Sunset Boulevard.
  
  wn.com/Billy_Wilder
• Bob Crewe
  Bob Crewe (born Stanley Robert Crewe, November 12, 1931, Newark, New Jersey) is an American songwriter, dancer, singer, manager, record producer and fine artist. He is known for producing, and co-writing with Bob Gaudio, a string of Top 10 singles for The Four Seasons. He is equally known for his hit recordings with The Rays, Diane Renay, Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, Freddy Cannon, Lesley Gore, Oliver, Michael Jackson, Bobby Darin, Roberta Flack, Peabo Bryson, Patti LaBelle and his own The Bob Crewe Generation.
  Reared in Belleville, New Jersey, Crewe demonstrated an early and apparent gift for both art and music. Although lacking in formal musical training, he instinctively gravitated to learning from many of the great 19th and 20th century classical romantic composers as well as giants of jazz and swing, including Stan Kenton, Harry James, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, and Tommy Dorsey. He studied for almost a year at Parsons School of Design in New York City with the intention of eventually pursuing a career in architecture.
  
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  Bob Newhart
  George Robert "Bob" Newhart (born September 5, 1929), is an American stand-up comedian and actor. Noted for his deadpan and slightly stammering delivery, Newhart came to prominence in the 1960s when his album of comedic monologues The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart was a worldwide bestseller and reached #1 on the Billboard pop music charts—it remains the 20th best-selling comedy album in history. The follow-up album, The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back! was also a massive success, and both albums held the Billboard #1 and #2 spots simultaneously, a feat unequaled until the 1991 release of Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II by hard rock band Guns N' Roses.
  Newhart later went into acting, starring in two long-running and prize-winning situation comedies, first as psychologist Dr. Robert "Bob" Hartley on the 1970s sitcom The Bob Newhart Show and then as innkeeper Dick Loudon on the 1980s sitcom Newhart. He also had a third, short-lived sitcom in the nineties titled Bob. Newhart also appeared in film roles such as Major Major in Catch-22, and Papa Elf in Elf. He provided the voice of Bernard in the Walt Disney animated films The Rescuers and The Rescuers Down Under. One of his most recent roles is the library head Judson in The Librarian. In 2011, Newhart appeared in the film Horrible Bosses.
  
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  Bobbie Gentry
  Roberta Lee Streeter (born July 27, 1944), professionally known as Bobbie Gentry, is an American former singer-songwriter notable as one of the first female country artists to compose and produce her own material. Her songs typically drew on her Mississippi roots to compose vignettes of the Southern United States.
  Gentry shot to international fame with her intriguing Southern Gothic narrative "Ode to Billie Joe" in 1967. The track was fourth in the Billboard year-end chart of 1967 and earned her Grammy awards for Best New Artist and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance in 1968. Gentry charted eleven singles on the Billboard Hot 100 and four singles on the United Kingdom Top 40. Her album Fancy brought her a Grammy nomination for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. After her first albums, she had a successful run of variety shows on the Las Vegas Strip. She lost interest in performing in the late 1970s and has since lived privately in Los Angeles.
  Gentry was born Roberta Streeter and is of English and Portuguese ancestry.^{[citation needed]} She was born in Chickasaw County, Mississippi, to Robert and Ruby (Bullington) Streeter. She has an older brother, Robert Streeter, Jr. Her parents divorced shortly after her birth, and her mother moved to California. She was raised on her grandparents' farm in Chickasaw County. Her grandmother traded one of the family's milk cows for a neighbor's piano, and seven-year-old Bobbie composed her first song, "My Dog Sergeant Is a Good Dog". She attended school in Greenwood, Mississippi, and began teaching herself to play the guitar, bass, banjo, and vibes.
  
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  Bobby Darin
  Bobby Darin (born Walden Robert Cassotto; May 14, 1936 – December 20, 1973) was an American singer who performed in a range of music genres, including pop, rock, jazz, folk, and country.
  He started as a songwriter for Connie Francis, and recorded his own first million-seller "Splish Splash" in 1958. This was followed by "Dream Lover", "Mack the Knife" and "Beyond the Sea", which brought him world fame. In 1962, he won a Golden Globe for his first film Come September, co-starring his wife Sandra Dee.
  Through the 1960s he became more political, and worked on Bobby Kennedy's presidential campaign, being present on the night of his assassination. This affected him and sent him into a period of seclusion.
  Although he made a successful television comeback, his health was starting to fail, as he had always expected, following bouts of rheumatic fever in childhood. This knowledge had always spurred him on to exploit his musical talent while still young. He died at 37, following a heart operation in Los Angeles.
  
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  Bruce Hornsby
  Bruce Randall Hornsby (born November 23, 1954) is an American singer, pianist, accordion player, and songwriter. Known for the spontaneity and creativity of his live performances, Hornsby draws frequently from classical, jazz, bluegrass, folk, Motown, rock, blues, and jam band musical traditions with his songwriting and the seamless improvisations contained within.
  Hornsby's recordings have been recognised on a number of occasions with industry awards, including the Best New Artist Grammy in 1987 with Bruce Hornsby and the Range, the Best Bluegrass Recording Grammy in 1990, and the Best Pop Instrumental Grammy in 1993.
  Hornsby has also achieved recognition for his solo albums and performances, his current live act Bruce Hornsby & the Noise Makers, his bluegrass project with Ricky Skaggs, his jazz act The Bruce Hornsby Trio, and his appearances as a session- and guest-musician. He also collaborated with the Grateful Dead and was a member of the band from September 1990 to March 1992, playing at many shows during this period in their history.
  
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  Bruce Johnston
  Bruce Arthur Johnston (born Benjamin Baldwin on June 27, 1942) is a member of The Beach Boys and a songwriter, remembered especially for composing "I Write the Songs". Johnston was not one of the original members of the band. He joined the band on April 9, 1965 after Glen Campbell (who was substituting on stage for the group's chief song writer Brian Wilson) decided to embark on a solo career. Johnston's first vocal recording with the Beach Boys was "California Girls."
  As a child Johnston was adopted by William and Irene Johnston of Chicago, and grew up on the West side of Los Angeles in Brentwood and Bel-Air. His adoptive father was president of the Owl Rexall Drug Company in Los Angeles after moving from Walgreens in Chicago. Johnston attended private school Bel-Air Town And Country School (later renamed John Thomas Dye School) in Los Angeles and also studied classical piano in his early years. In high school, Johnston switched to contemporary music. He performed in a few "beginning" bands during this time and then moved on to working with young musicians such as Sandy Nelson, Kim Fowley and Phil Spector. Soon Johnston began backing people such as Ritchie Valens, the Everly Brothers, and even Eddie Cochran. In 1959 while still in high school, Johnston arranged and played on his first hit record called "Teenbeat" by Sandy Nelson. The single record reached the Billboard Top Ten. The same year Johnston made his first single under his own name, "Take This Pearl" on Arwin Records (a record label owned by Doris Day) as part of the Bruce & Terry duo.
  
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  Burt Bacharach
  Burt F. Bacharach ( /ˈbækəræk/ BAK-ə-rak; born May 12, 1928) is an American pianist, composer and music producer. He is known for his popular hit songs and compositions from the mid-1950s through the 1980s, with lyrics written by Hal David. Many of their hits were produced specifically for, and performed by, Dionne Warwick. Following on with the initial success of this collaboration, Bacharach went on to produce hits with Dusty Springfield, Bobbie Gentry, Jackie DeShannon and others.
  As of 2006^[update], Bacharach had written 70 Top 40 hits in the U.S., and 52 Top 40 hits in the UK.
  Burt Bacharach was born in Kansas City, Missouri, but grew up in the Forest Hills section of New York City, graduating from Forest Hills High School in 1946. He is the son of Irma (née Freeman) and Bert Bacharach, a well-known syndicated newspaper columnist, and is of German-Jewish descent. Bacharach studied music at McGill University, under Helmut Blume, at the Mannes School of Music, and at the Music Academy of the West in Montecito, California. His composition teachers included Darius Milhaud, Henry Cowell, and Bohuslav Martinů. Following service in the Army, Bacharach worked as a pianist, both as a solo player and as an accompanist for singers such as Vic Damone, Polly Bergen, Steve Lawrence, the Ames Brothers and Paula Stewart (who became his first wife). For some years he was musical arranger for Marlene Dietrich as well as touring with her.
  
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  Carly Simon
  Carly Elisabeth Simon (born June 25, 1945) is an American singer-songwriter, musician, and children's author. She rose to fame in the 1970s with a string of hit records, and has since been the recipient of two Grammy Awards, an Academy Award, and a Golden Globe Award for her work. Throughout her career, she has amassed 13 Top 40 hits including "You're So Vain", "Nobody Does It Better", and "Coming Around Again".
  The former wife of another notable singer-songwriter, James Taylor, she has two children, Sarah "Sally" Maria Taylor and Ben Taylor, who are also musicians.
  She was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1994.
  Carly Simon was born in New York City, New York. Her father, of Jewish descent, was Richard L. Simon (co-founder of Simon & Schuster), a pianist who often played Chopin and Beethoven at home. Her mother was Andrea Louise Simon (née Heinemann), a civil rights activist and singer, of black and German descent. In a 2004 interview with fashion designer Michael Kors for the July issue of Interview Magazine, she revealed her full ancestry as Jewish, African, Cuban, and French.
  
  wn.com/Carly_Simon
• Carmine Coppola
  Carmine Coppola (June 11, 1910 – April 26, 1991) was an American composer, flautist, editor, musical director, and songwriter. Coppola was a composer and conductor who contributed to many of the musical scores in The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, The Godfather Part III, and Apocalypse Now directed by his son Francis Ford Coppola.
  Coppola was born in New York City, the son of Marie (née Zasa) and Agostino Coppola. His brother is Maestro Anton Coppola. He was the father of August Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola, and Talia Shire, and grandfather of Nicolas Cage, Sofia Coppola, Jason Schwartzman and Robert Schwartzman. His wife, Italia Coppola, died in 2004 in Los Angeles. Coppola died in Northridge, California at the age of 80. Upon his death, Coppola's grandson Robert Schwartzman changed his last name to 'Carmine' in his grandfather's honor.
  
  wn.com/Carmine_Coppola
• Carol Hall
  Carol Hall is an American composer and lyricist, born in Abilene, Texas.
  Hall is best known for composing the music and lyrics for the Broadway stage musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1978, adapted as a film in 1982). Her other major works include the unsuccessful Broadway sequel The Best Little Whorehouse Goes Public (1994), as well as the stage play To Whom It May Concern (c. 1986).[1]
  Hall's career includes singing in clubs and similar venues. She signed to Elektra Records as a singer-sngwriter and had two albums released on the label in the early 1970s, If I Be Your Lady and Beads and Feathers. [2]
  Hall appeared also on the LP Free to Be… You and Me (1972) and the 1974 television special based on the album, having written the songs "Parents Are People," "It's All Right To Cry," and "Glad To Have A Friend Like You."
  For the 1977 duet album of Tony Bennett and Bill Evans, entitled Together Again, Hall co-wrote the number "The Two Lonely People."
  For Sesame Street, Hall along with Sam Pottle co-wrote the song "A Very Simple Dance" (1974).
  
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• Carole Bayer Sager
  Carole Bayer Sager (born March 8,^{[citation needed]} 1947) is an American lyricist, songwriter, singer, and painter.
  Carole Bayer was born in New York City to parents Anita and Eli Bayer. She graduated from New York University, where she majored in English, dramatic arts and speech. She had already co-written her first pop hit, "A Groovy Kind of Love", with Toni Wine, while still a student at the New York City High School of Music and Art. It was recorded by the British invasion band The Mindbenders, whose version was a worldwide hit, reaching #2 on the Billboard magazine Hot 100. This song was later recorded by Sonny & Cher, Petula Clark, and Phil Collins, whose rendition for the film Buster reached Number one in 1988. She also had a minor career of singing songs as well—her biggest hit was her 1977 single, You're Moving Out Today.
  Sager's first recording as a singer was the 1977 album Carole Bayer Sager, which included the #1 international single^{[citation needed]} "You're Moving Out Today", a song which she co-wrote with Bette Midler. (Paul Buckmaster provided horn and string arrangements for the album.) The album went platinum in Japan, Australia, and the United Kingdom. It was followed by ...Too in 1978 and a third and last album, co-produced by Burt Bacharach, entitled Sometimes Late at Night (1981), which included a top 30 hit single "Stronger Than Before", later recorded by Dionne Warwick and Chaka Khan.
  
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  Carole King
  Carole King (born February 9, 1942) is an American singer, songwriter, and pianist. King and her former husband Gerry Goffin wrote more than two dozen chart hits for numerous artists during the 1960s, many of which have become standards. As a singer, her Tapestry album topped the U.S. album chart for 15 weeks in 1971, and remained on the charts for more than six years.
  She was most successful as a performer in the first half of the 1970s, although she was a successful songwriter long before and long after. She had her first number 1 hit as a songwriter in 1961 at age 18, with "Will You Love Me Tomorrow", which she wrote with Goffin. In 1997, she co-wrote "The Reason" for Aerosmith, but instead it was sung by Celine Dion.
  In 2000, Joel Whitburn, a Billboard Magazine pop music researcher, named her the most successful female songwriter of 1955–99, because she wrote or co-wrote 118 pop hits on the Billboard Hot 100.
  King has made 25 solo albums, the most successful being Tapestry. Her most recent non-compilation album is Live at the Troubadour, a collaboration with James Taylor, which reached number 4 on the charts in its first week, and has sold over 600,000 copies.
  
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  Carrie Underwood
  Carrie Marie Underwood (born March 10, 1983) is an American country singer, songwriter and actress who rose to fame as the winner of the fourth season of American Idol, in 2005. Underwood has since become a multi-platinum selling recording artist, a winner of several Grammy Awards, Billboard Music Awards and American Music Awards, a Golden Globe Award nominee, a three-time Academy of Country Music and Country Music Association Female Vocalist winner, and a two-time ACM Entertainer of the Year. She is the first-ever female artist to win back-to-back Academy of Country Music (ACM) Awards for Entertainer of the Year (2009/10). Underwood was inducted into and became a member of the Grand Ole Opry in 2008. She was also inducted into the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame in 2009.Billboard named Underwood Country Music's reigning Queen in 2012.
  
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  Catwoman
  Catwoman is a fictional character associated with DC Comics' Batman franchise. Historically an antihero, the character was created by Bill Finger and Bob Kane, partially inspired by Kane's cousin, Ruth Steel. Kane, a frequent movie goer, also mentioned that Jean Harlow was a model for the design.
  The original and most widely known Catwoman, Selina Kyle, first appears in Batman #1 (Spring 1940) in which she is known as The Cat. She is an adversary of Batman, known for having a complex love-hate (often romantic) relationship with him. In her first appearance, she was a whip-carrying burglar with a taste for high-stake thefts. For many years Catwoman thrived, but from September 1954 to November 1966 she took an extended hiatus due to the newly developing Comics Code Authority in 1954. These issues involved the rules regarding the development and portrayal of female characters that were in violation of the Comics Code.
  Since the 1990s, Catwoman has been featured in an eponymous series that cast her as an antihero rather than a supervillain. The character has been one of Batman's most enduring love interests and has been described as Batman's one true love. Many modern writers have also interpreted her activities and costumed identity as a response to a history of abuse.
  
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• Charles Fuller
  Charles H. Fuller, Jr. (born 5 March 1939) is an American playwright, best known for his play, A Soldier's Play, for which he received the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
  Fuller was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1939, the son of Charles H. Fuller, Sr. and Lillian Anderson. He attended Roman Catholic High School and then Villanova University (1956–1958), then joined the U.S. Army in 1959, serving in Japan and South Korea. He left the army in 1962, and later studied at La Salle University (1965–1967), earning a DFA. He co-founded the Afro-American Arts Theatre Philadelphia
  Fuller vowed to become a writer after noticing that his high school's library had no books by African American authors. He achieved critical notice in 1969 with The Village: A Party, a drama about racial tensions between a group of mixed-race couples. He later wrote plays for the Henry Street Settlement theatre and the Negro Ensemble Company in New York, who have performed several of his plays. His 1975 play The Brownsville Raid is based on the Brownsville Affair, an altercation between black soldiers and white civilians in Brownsville, Texas, in 1906, which led to an entire black regiment being dishonorably discharged though later pardoned in 1976.
  
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• Charles Strouse
  Charles Strouse (born June 7, 1928) is an American composer and lyricist.
  Strouse was born and raised in New York City, the son of Ira and Ethel (Newman) Strouse. A graduate of the Eastman School of Music, Strouse studied under David Diamond, Aaron Copland and Nadia Boulanger.
  Strouse's first Broadway musical was the 1960 hit Bye Bye Birdie, with lyrics by Lee Adams, who would become his long time collaborator. Strouse won his first Tony Award for best score for this musical, which is considered the precursor of the rock musical. Strouse's next show, All American, with a book by Mel Brooks and lyrics by Adams, came in 1962 and produced the standard “Once Upon a Time” (recorded by Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett and Bobby Darin, among others). Following this was Golden Boy (1964, also with Adams), starring Sammy Davis, Jr. and It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's Superman (1966, based on the popular comic strip) which introduced the song "You've Got Possibilities" sung by Linda Lavin.
  In 1970, Applause (starring Lauren Bacall, with book by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and lyrics by Adams) won Strouse his second Tony Award. In 1977, Strouse adapted another comic strip for the stage, creating the hit Annie, which garnered him his third Tony Award and two Grammy Awards. Other Strouse musicals include Charlie and Algernon (1979), Dance a Little Closer (1983, with lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner), Rags (1986), Nick & Nora (1993), and An American Tragedy (1995, with lyrics by David Shaber). Strouse also wrote a number of musical revues, many with Adams.
  
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  Charlie Chaplin
  Sir Charles Spencer "Charlie" Chaplin, KBE (16 April 1889 – 25 December 1977) was an English comic actor, film director and composer best known for his work during the silent film era. He became the most famous film star in the world before the end of World War I. Chaplin used mime, slapstick and other visual comedy routines, and continued well into the era of the talkies, though his films decreased in frequency from the end of the 1920s. His most famous role was that of The Tramp, which he first played in the Keystone comedy Kid Auto Races at Venice in 1914. From the April 1914 one-reeler Twenty Minutes of Love onwards he was writing and directing most of his films, by 1916 he was also producing them, and from 1918 he was even composing the music for them. With Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D. W. Griffith, he co-founded United Artists in 1919.
  Chaplin was one of the most creative and influential personalities of the silent-film era. He was influenced by his predecessor, the French silent film comedian Max Linder, to whom he dedicated one of his films. His working life in entertainment spanned over 75 years, from the Victorian stage and the music hall in the United Kingdom as a child performer, until close to his death at the age of 88. His high-profile public and private life encompassed both adulation and controversy. Chaplin was identified with left-wing politics during the McCarthy era and he was ultimately forced to resettle in Europe from 1952.
  
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  Christina Aguilera
  Christina María Aguilera (born December 18, 1980) is an American recording artist and actress. Aguilera first appeared on national television in 1990 as a contestant on the Star Search program, and went on to star in Disney Channel's television series The Mickey Mouse Club from 1993 to 1994. Aguilera signed to RCA Records after recording "Reflection", the theme song for the animated film Mulan (1998).
  In 1999, Aguilera came to prominence following her debut album Christina Aguilera, which was a commercial success spawning three number one singles on the Billboard Hot 100—"Genie in a Bottle", "What a Girl Wants", and "Come On Over Baby (All I Want Is You)." Her sophomore and her debut Latin-pop album, Mi Reflejo (2000), a Christmas third studio album, My Kind of Christmas (2000), and several collaborations followed which garnered Aguilera worldwide success, though she was displeased with her lack of input in her music and image. After parting from her management, Aguilera took creative control over her fourth studio album, Stripped (2002). The album's second single, "Beautiful", was a commercial success and helped the album's commercial performance amidst controversy over Aguilera's image. Aguilera followed up Stripped with the soul, jazz and blues inspired, Back to Basics (2006), released to positive critical acclaim. The album produced three singles "Ain't No Other Man", "Hurt" and "Candyman". Four years later Aguilera released her sixth studio album, Bionic (2010), which incorporated aspects of R&B, electropop, and synthpop and was met with mixed reviews and low sales. Aguilera's seventh studio album is set to be released in 2012.
  
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  Christopher Cross
  Christopher Cross (born Christopher Charles Geppert; May 3, 1951) is an American singer-songwriter from San Antonio, Texas. His debut album earned him five Grammys. He is perhaps best known for his US Top Ten hit songs, "Sailing", "Ride Like the Wind", and "Arthur's Theme (Best That You Can Do)", the last of which he recorded for the film Arthur starring Dudley Moore. "Sailing" earned three Grammy Awards in 1981, while "Arthur's Theme" won the Oscar for Best Original Song in 1981 (with co-composers Burt Bacharach, Carole Bayer Sager and Peter Allen).
  Cross first played with a San Antonio-based cover band named Flash (not to be confused with the early 1970s English band of the same name) before signing a solo contract with Warner Bros.
  Cross released his self-titled debut album, Christopher Cross, in 1979, which garnered him five Grammy Awards. He was the first solo artist to win all four General Field Grammy Awards (Record of the Year, Album of the Year, Song of the Year and Best New Artist) in the same year. Hot 100 top 20 hits from this album included "Ride Like the Wind" (featuring backing vocals by Michael McDonald), "Sailing", "Never Be the Same", and "Say You'll Be Mine" (featuring backing vocals by Nicolette Larson).
  
  wn.com/Christopher_Cross
• Christopher Hampton
  Christopher James Hampton, CBE, FRSL (born 26 January 1946) is a British playwright, screen writer and film director. He is best known for his play based on the novel Les Liaisons dangereuses and the film version Dangerous Liaisons (1988) and also more recently for writing the nominated screenplay for the film adaptation of Ian McEwan's Atonement.
  Hampton was born in Faial, Azores, to British parents Dorothy Patience (née Herrington) and Bernard Patrick Hampton, a marine telecommunications engineer for Cable & Wireless. His father's job led the family to subsequently settle in Aden and Alexandria in Egypt and later Hong Kong and Zanzibar. The Suez Crisis in 1956 necessitated that the family flee under cover of darkness, leaving their possessions behind.
  After a prep school at Reigate, Hampton went to the independent boarding school Lancing College at the age of 13, where he won house colours for boxing and distinguished himself as a sergeant in the CCF. Fellow dramatist David Hare was a school contemporary; poet Harry Guest was a teacher.
  
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  Cy Coleman
  Cy Coleman (June 14, 1929 - November 18, 2004) was an American composer, songwriter, and jazz pianist.
  He was born Seymour Kaufman on June 14, 1929, in New York City to Eastern European Jewish parents, and was raised in the Bronx. His mother, Ida (née Prizent) was an apartment landlady and his father was a brickmason. He was a child prodigy who gave piano recitals at Steinway Hall, Town Hall, and Carnegie Hall between the ages of six and nine. Before beginning his fabled Broadway career, he led the Cy Coleman Trio, which made many recordings and was a much-in-demand club attraction.
  Despite the early classical and jazz success, he decided to build a career in popular music. His first collaborator was Joseph Allen McCarthy, but his most successful early partnership, albeit a turbulent one, was with Carolyn Leigh. The pair wrote many pop hits, including "Witchcraft" and "The Best Is Yet To Come." One of his instrumentals, "Playboy's Theme," became the signature music of the regular TV shows and specials presented by Playboy, and remains synonymous with the magazine and its creator, Hugh Hefner.
  
  wn.com/Cy_Coleman
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  Cyndi Lauper
  Cynthia Ann Stephanie Lauper (born June 22, 1953 in Queens, New York) is an American singer, songwriter, actress, and LGBT rights activist.
  She achieved success in the mid-1980s with the release of the debut solo album She's So Unusual in 1983, which spawned four Billboard Hot 100 top-five songs—"Girls Just Wanna Have Fun", "Time After Time", "She Bop" and "All Through the Night"—She's So Unusual was the first album in history to have four top five singles by a female. The album earned Lauper Best New Artist at the 27th Grammy Awards in 1985.
  Her success continued with the follow-up, True Colors in 1986, which spawned two Billboard Hot 100 top-ten songs—"True Colors" and "Change of Heart", and earned two nominations at the 29th Grammy Awards.
  Since 1989 released from a nine studio albums acclaimed critical, A Night to Remember (1989), Hat Full of Stars (1993), Sisters of Avalon (1996), Merry Christmas... Have a Nice Life (1998),Shine (2001), At Last (2003), The Body Acoustic (2005), Bring Ya to the Brink (2008).
  
  wn.com/Cyndi_Lauper
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  David Mamet
  David Alan Mamet ( /ˈmæmɨt/; born November 30, 1947) is an American playwright, essayist, screenwriter and film director.
  Best known as a playwright, Mamet won a Pulitzer Prize and received a Tony nomination for Glengarry Glen Ross (1984). He also received a Tony nomination for Speed-the-Plow (1988). As a screenwriter, he received Oscar nominations for The Verdict (1982) and Wag the Dog (1997). Mamet's books include: The Old Religion (1997), a novel about the lynching of Leo Frank; Five Cities of Refuge: Weekly Reflections on Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy (2004), a Torah commentary with Rabbi Lawrence Kushner; The Wicked Son (2006), a study of Jewish self-hatred and antisemitism; and Bambi vs. Godzilla, a commentary on the movie business.
  Mamet was born in 1947 in Chicago to Jewish parents, Lenore June (Silver), a teacher, and Bernard Morris Mamet, an attorney. One of his first jobs was as a busboy at Chicago's The Second City. He was educated at the progressive Francis W. Parker School and at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont.
  
  wn.com/David_Mamet
• David Shire
  | name = David Shire | background = non_vocal_instrumentalist | birth_name = David Lee Shire | birth_date = (1937-07-03) July 3, 1937 (age 74) |birth_place =Buffalo, New York | occupation = Composer | instrument = Piano | genre = Film score
  musicals
  Television score | years_active = 1960s–present
  David Lee Shire (born July 3, 1937) is an American songwriter and the composer of stage musicals, film and television scores. The soundtrack to the 1974 movie The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974 film) and parts of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack such as Night on Disco Mountain, an adaptation of Modest Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain, are some of his best known works. His other work includes the score of the 1985 film, Return to Oz, the "sequel-in-part" of The Wizard of Oz (1939 film). Shire is married to actress Didi Conn.
  Shire was born in Buffalo, New York, the son of Esther Miriam (née Sheinberg) and Buffalo society band leader and piano teacher Irving Daniel Shire. He met his long-time theater collaborator lyricist/director Richard Maltby, Jr. at Yale University, where they wrote two musicals, Cyrano and Grand Tour, which were produced by the Yale Dramatic Association. Shire also co-fronted a jazz group at school, the Shire-Fogg Quintet, and was a Phi Beta Kappa honors student, with a double major in English and music. He was a member of the Pundits and Elihu and he graduated magna cum laude in 1959.
  
  wn.com/David_Shire
• David Zippel
  David Joel Zippel (born May 17, 1954) is an American musical theatre lyricist.
  Zippel was born in Easton, Pennsylvania. He is a 1976 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. While there, he wrote a "bizarre political musical" called Rotunda. He had intended on going to Harvard Law School to become a theatrical lawyer, but when he met Wally Harper (at the time Barbara Cook's accompanist and was in need of a lyricist, Zippel offered his services. Two of the songs they wrote together were used when Cook sang at Carnegie Hall. According to his official biography, "he is delighted not to practice law."^{[citation needed]}
  He also wrote the theme song to Veronica's Closet.
  His theatrical credits include:
  Zippel contributed lyrics to The Swan Princess (music by Lex de Azevedo, the song Far Longer than Forever was nominated for a Golden Globe Award), as well as provided the singing voice of Jean-Bob the Frog, and more notably wrote the lyrics for the Disney films Hercules, with music by Alan Menken (the song "Go the Distance" received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song) and Mulan, with music by Matthew Wilder. The music and lyrics received an Academy Award nomination for Best Musical or Comedy Score. A year later, Zippel collaborated with Phil Collins for Tarzan. He was in his agent Richard Kraft's film Finding Kraftland.
  
  wn.com/David_Zippel
• Dean Pitchford
  Dean Pitchford (born July 29, 1951, Honolulu, Hawaii) is an American songwriter, screenwriter, director, actor, and novelist. His work has earned him an Oscar and a Golden Globe Award, as well as nominations for three additional Oscars, two more Golden Globes, seven Grammy Awards and two Tony Awards.
  Pitchford was born in Honolulu, where he attended Star Of The Sea School and graduated (1968) from Saint Louis High School.
  Pitchford began his performance career as an actor and singer with the Honolulu Community Theatre (now Diamond Head Theatre), the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra and the Honolulu Theatre for Youth, among others.
  While studying at Yale University, Pitchford performed with numerous campus drama groups, but his focus gradually turned off-campus, where he worked with the Wooster Square Revival, an experimental theatre company that offered acting opportunities to recovering addicts and alcoholics. In 1969, Pitchford returned to Honolulu as a writers’ assistant to authors Faye Hammel and Sylvan Levey, updating the popular guidebook Hawai’i on $5 and $10 A Day, and researching TWA’s Budget Guide to Hawai’i, the first of a series of guidebooks that would eventually metamorphose into the popular series TWA Getaway Guides.
  
  wn.com/Dean_Pitchford
• Debby Boone
  Deborah ("Debby") Anne Boone (born September 22, 1956) is an American singer and stage actress. She is best known for her 1977 hit, "You Light Up My Life," which spent a then record ten weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and led to her winning the Grammy Award for Best New Artist the following year. Boone later focused her music career on country music resulting in the 1980 No. 1 country hit, "Are You on the Road to Lovin' Me Again". In the 1980s, she recorded Christian music which garnered her four top 10 Contemporary Christian albums as well as two more Grammys. Throughout her career, Boone has appeared in several musical theater productions and has co-authored many children's books with husband, Gabriel Ferrer.
  Debby Boone was born in Hackensack, New Jersey, the third of four daughters born to singer-actor Pat Boone and Shirley Foley Boone, daughter of country music star Red Foley. When Boone was 14 years old, she began touring with her parents and three sisters: Cherry, Lindy and Laury. The sisters first recorded with their parents as The Pat Boone Family and later as the Boones or Boone Girls. They primarily recorded gospel music, although the sisters also released singles for the Motown and Curb labels that were remakes of secular pop music featuring Debby as the lead vocalist.
  
  wn.com/Debby_Boone
• Donald Margulies
  Donald Margulies (born September 2, 1954) (MARG-yoo-leez) is an American playwright and a professor of English and Theater Studies at Yale University. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2000 for his play, Dinner With Friends.
  Other notable works include Time Stands Still (2009); Shipwrecked! An Entertainment — The Amazing Adventures of Louis de Rougemont (As Told by Himself) (2007), Brooklyn Boy (2004), Sight Unseen (1991) and Collected Stories (1996), the last three of which were commissioned and originally produced by South Coast Repertory. "Sight Unseen" (which won a 1992 OBIE Award for Best American Play and the Dramatists' Guild/Hull-Warriner Award) and "Collected Stories" were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, in 1992 and 1997, respectively.
  "Dinner With Friends" was commissioned by Actors Theatre of Louisville [KY], where it had its world premiere at the 1998 Humana Festival of New American Plays. It was produced later that year at South Coast Repertory [Costa Mesa, CA], and opened November 4, 1999 at the Variety Arts Theatre [New York] where it played 654 performances. In addition to the Pulitzer, "Dinner with Friends" received an American Theatre Critics’ Association New Play Citation, The Dramatists’ Guild/Hull-Warriner Award, the Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Off-Broadway Play, the Outer Critics Circle Award, a Drama Desk Award nomination, and was selected a Burns Mantle Best Play of 1999-2000). It went on to have a long run in Paris at the Comedie des Champs-Elysees, and productions in cities all over the world including London, Berlin, Vienna, Stockholm, Tokyo, Mumbai, Seoul, Tel Aviv and Istanbul. In 2001 it was an Emmy Award-nominated film for HBO.
  
  wn.com/Donald_Margulies
• Douglas Furber
  Douglas Furber (13 May 1885 – 20 February 1961) was a British lyricist and playwright.
  Furber is best known for the lyrics to the 1937 song The Lambeth Walk and the libretto to the musical Me and My Girl, composed by Noel Gay, from which it came. This show made broadcasting history when in 1939 it became the first full length musical to be broadcast on television. A 1986 revival went on to achieve great acclaim, and was nominated for Tony awards for both Best Score and Best Book.
  Furber made his first entry into song writing with the Australian born composer A. Emmett Adams. Following a visit to St. Mary's Church, Southampton, England in 1914, the two wrote The Bells of St. Mary's. The song was published in 1917 This became a major hit in America, in 1917, despite having been originally rejected by the publishers. In 1945, Bing Crosby had a hit with The Bells of St. Mary's after it was used as the title song to the film of the same name.
  Other hits include Limehouse Blues from 1924, written with composer Philip Braham.
  
  wn.com/Douglas_Furber
• 
  Edward Albee
  Edward Franklin Albee III ( /ˈɔːlbiː/ AWL-bee; born March 12, 1928) is an American playwright who is best known for The Zoo Story (1958), The Sandbox (1959), Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), and a rewrite of the book for the unsuccessful musical version of Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's (1966). His works are considered well-crafted, often unsympathetic examinations of the modern condition. His early works reflect a mastery and Americanization of the Theatre of the Absurd that found its peak in works by European playwrights such as Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, and Jean Genet. Younger American playwrights, such as Paula Vogel, credit Albee's daring mix of theatricalism and biting dialogue with helping to reinvent the post-war American theatre in the early 1960s. Albee continues to experiment in new works, such as The Goat: or, Who Is Sylvia? (2002).
  According to Magill's Survey of American Literature (2007), Edward Albee was born somewhere in Virginia (the popular belief is that he was born in Washington, D.C.). He was adopted two weeks later and taken to Larchmont, New York in Westchester County, where he grew up. Albee's adoptive father, Reed A. Albee, the wealthy son of vaudeville magnate Edward Franklin Albee II, owned several theaters. Here the young Edward first gained familiarity with the theatre as a child. His adoptive mother, Reed's third wife, Frances tried to raise Albee to fit into their social circles.
  
  wn.com/Edward_Albee
• Edward Kleban
  Edward “Ed” Kleban (April 30, 1939 - December 28, 1987) was an American musical theatre composer and lyricist.
  Kleban was born in the Bronx, New York in 1939 and graduated from New York's High School of Music & Art and Columbia University, where he attended with future playwright Terrance McNally. Kleban is best known as lyricist of the Broadway hit A Chorus Line. He and composer Marvin Hamlisch won the 1976 Tony Award for Best Original Score, and he shared the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1976 with Hamlisch and three other contributors to the musical. The one-woman Phyllis Newman show, The Madwoman of Central Park West (1979), featured a few tunes with his lyrics. For several years he worked at Columbia Records, where he produced albums by performers as diverse as Igor Stravinsky and Percy Faith and the album for the Off-Broadway musical Now Is The Time For All Good Men.
  He was a teacher for many years at the BMI (Broadcast Music Incorporated) Musical Theater Workshop.
  In his will, Kleban established the Kleban Foundation which grants annual awards, each in the amount of $100,000 over two years, to the most promising librettist and lyricist in American musical theatre. The awards are administered by BMI. His will also granted rights to his collection of unpublished songs to friends Avery Corman and Wendy Wasserstein with the request that they incorporate them into a new musical. Their attempts failed and the rights reverted to Kleban's longtime companion, librettist Linda Kline. Kline sought someone who did not know or work with Kleban, but who would learn about him through the material. She admired previous work of Lonny Price and sought him as a collaborator.
  
  wn.com/Edward_Kleban
• Elmer Bernstein
  Elmer Bernstein (April 4, 1922 – August 18, 2004) was an American composer and conductor best known for his many film scores. In a career which spanned fifty years, he composed music for hundreds of film and television productions. His most popular works include the scores to The Magnificent Seven, The Ten Commandments, The Great Escape, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Ghostbusters.
  Bernstein won an Oscar for his score to Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967) and was nominated for fourteen Oscars in total. He also won two Golden Globes and was nominated for two Grammy Awards.
  Bernstein was born in New York City, the son of Selma (née Feinstein) and Edward Bernstein. He was not related to the celebrated composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, but the two men were friends, and even shared a certain physical similarity. Within the world of professional music, they were distinguished from each other by the use of the nicknames Bernstein West (Elmer) and Bernstein East (Leonard).
  During his childhood, Bernstein performed professionally as a dancer and an actor, in the latter case playing the part of Caliban in The Tempest on Broadway, and he also won several prizes for his painting. He gravitated toward music at the age of twelve, at which time he was given a scholarship in piano by Henriette Michelson, a Juilliard teacher who guided him throughout his entire career as a pianist. She took him to play some of his improvisations for composer Aaron Copland, who was encouraging and selected Israel Citkowitz as a teacher for the young boy. Bernstein's music has some stylistic similarities to Copland's music, most notably in his western scores, particularly sections of Big Jake, in the Gregory Peck film Amazing Grace and Chuck, and in his spirited score for the 1958 film adaptation of Erskine Caldwell's novel God's Little Acre.
  
  wn.com/Elmer_Bernstein
• 
  Elton John
  Sir Elton Hercules John, CBE (born Reginald Kenneth Dwight on 25 March 1947) is an English rock singer-songwriter, composer, pianist and occasional actor. He has worked with lyricist Bernie Taupin as his songwriter partner since 1967; they have collaborated on more than 30 albums to date.
  In his four-decade career John has sold more than 250 million records, making him one of the most successful artists of all time. His single "Candle in the Wind 1997" has sold over 33 million copies worldwide, and is the best selling single in Billboard history. He has more than 50 Top 40 hits, including seven consecutive No. 1 US albums, 56 Top 40 singles, 16 Top 10, four No. 2 hits, and nine No. 1 hits. He has won six Grammy Awards, four Brit Awards, an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award and a Tony Award. In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked him Number 49 on its list of the 100 greatest artists of all time.
  John was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994. Having been named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1996, John received a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II for "services to music and charitable services" in 1998.
  
  wn.com/Elton_John
• Emery Reves
  Emery Reves (Hungarian: Révész Imre) (16 February 1904 – 4 October 1981) was a writer, publisher, literary agent and advocate of world federalism.
  Reves was born in Bácsföldvár, Hungary, and educated in Berlin, Zurich and Paris.
  In 1933, he founded a publishing company, the "Cooperation Publishing Service"^[where?] known for its strong anti-Nazi stance. In 1937, he befriended Winston Churchill, becoming his literary agent. When Churchill was elected Prime Minister, Reves was sent to New York to help build up the British propaganda organisation in both North and South America. After the war, he purchased the rights to publish Winston Churchill's war memoirs outside Britain, and likewise Churchill's History of the English-Speaking Peoples.
  He is also known for publishing the book I Paid Hitler (1941) wherein he said Fritz Thyssen was clearly, in his mind, "one of the men most responsible for the rise of Hitler and for the seeking of power by the National Socialists in Germany".
  He was the author of The Anatomy of Peace, a 1945 book that helped popularize the cause of world federalism. Reves argued that world law was the only way to prevent war, and the fledgling United Nations Security Council would be inadequate to preserve peace because it was an instrument of power, rather than an instrument of law. His book was endorsed by Albert Einstein and numerous other prominent figures.
  
  wn.com/Emery_Reves
• 
  Esperanza Spalding
  Esperanza Spalding (born October 18, 1984) is an American multi-instrumentalist best known as a jazz bassist and singer, who draws upon many genres in her own compositions. In 2011, she won the Grammy Award for Best New Artist at the 53rd Grammy Awards, making her the first jazz artist to win the award.
  Spalding grew up in the King neighborhood of Portland, Oregon, a neighborhood she describes as "ghetto" and "pretty scary". Her mother raised her and her brother as a single parent. Spalding has a diverse ethnic background. Her father is African-American and her mother is of Welsh, Native American, and Hispanic descent. She also has an interest in the music of other cultures, including that of Brazil, commenting, "With Portuguese songs, the phrasing of the melody is intrinsically linked with the language, and it's beautiful."
  Her mother shares Spalding's interest in music, having nearly become a touring singer herself. But while Spalding cites her mother as a powerful influence who encouraged her musical expansion, she attributes her inspiration for pursuing a life in music to watching classical cellist Yo-Yo Ma perform on an episode of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood when she was four.
  
  wn.com/Esperanza_Spalding
• Euel Box
  Euel Box (born December 31, 1928) is a music producer, composer, arranger, and trumpeter who has written major film scores and radio jingles for major markets.
  He was born in Georgetown, Texas.
  Box studied composition at the University of North Texas College of Music in the 1950s and earned a Bachelor of Music Degree in 1952. One of his composition teachers was Violet Archer, resident composer. He was classmates with undergraduate student composer Larry Austin, Eloy Fominaya and graduate students Robert Gauldin and Clifford Shipp.
  Benji earned Box and his wife a 1975 nomination for an Oscar and won a Golden Globe award for best song.
  
  wn.com/Euel_Box
• Ewan MacColl
  Ewan MacColl (25 January 1915 – 22 October 1989) was a British folk singer, songwriter, socialist, actor, poet, playwright, and record producer. He was married to theatre director Joan Littlewood, and later to American folksinger Peggy Seeger. He collaborated with Littlewood in the theatre and with Seeger in folk music. He was the father of the late singer/songwriter Kirsty MacColl. Ewan sang Sacred Harp with Calum MacColl and Mike Seeger.
  MacColl was born as James Henry Miller in Broughton, Salford, Lancashire to Scottish parents, William Miller and Betsy Miller née Hendry. Both of his parents were socialists and William Miller was an iron-moulder and militant trade unionist who had moved to Salford with his wife to look for work after being blacklisted in almost every foundry in Scotland. They lived amongst a group of émigré Scots and Jimmy, their only surviving child of four, was brought up in an atmosphere of fierce political debate interspersed with the large repertoire of songs and stories his parents had brought from Scotland. He left school in 1930 during the Great Depression and, joining the ranks of the unemployed, began a life-long programme of self education whilst keeping warm in the Manchester Public Library.
  
  wn.com/Ewan_MacColl
• Francis Lai
  Francis Lai (born April 26, 1932, Nice, Alpes-Maritimes, France) is a French accordionist, and composer noted for his film scores.
  While in his twenties, Francis Lai left home and went to Paris where he became part of the lively Montmartre music scene. In 1965 he met filmmaker Claude Lelouch and was hired to help write the score for the film, Un homme et une femme (A Man and A Woman). Released in 1966, the film was a major international success, earning a number of Academy Awards, and for the young Francis Lai, a Golden Globe Award nomination for "Best Original Score". This initial success brought more opportunities to work for the film industry both in his native France as well as in Great Britain and the United States. He is known for his support of Mireille Mathieu in many compositions and recordings. In 1969, he wrote the score for director René Clément's film, Rider On The Rain ("Le Passager de la Pluie"). It sold over one million copies, and was awarded a gold disc in September 1971.
  
  wn.com/Francis_Lai
• Fred Ebb
  Fred Ebb (April 8, 1928 – September 11, 2004) was an American musical theatre lyricist who had many successful collaborations with composer John Kander. The Kander and Ebb team frequently wrote for such performers as Liza Minnelli and Chita Rivera.
  Ebb was born in Manhattan to a Jewish family, the son of Anna Evelyn (née Gritz) and Harry Ebb. He worked during the early 1950s bronzing baby shoes, as a trucker's assistant, and was also employed in a department store credit office and at a hosiery company. He graduated from New York University with a bachelor’s degree in English Literature, and also earned his Master’s Degree in English from Columbia University.
  One of his early collaborators was Phil Springer, and a song they wrote together ("I Never Loved Him Anyhow") was recorded by Carmen McRae in 1956. Another song Ebb wrote with Springer was "Heartbroken" (1953), which was recorded by Judy Garland, the mother of his future protégée, Liza Minnelli. Other Springer-Ebb tunes include "Moonlight Gambler" and "Nevertheless I Never Lost the Blues". "Don't Forget", which he wrote with Norman Leyden, was recorded by singer Eddy Arnold in 1954.
  
  wn.com/Fred_Ebb
• 
  Georges Delerue
  Georges Delerue (12 March 1925 – 20 March 1992) was a French composer who composed over 350 scores for cinema and television. Delerue won numerous important film music awards, including an Academy Award for A Little Romance (1980), three César Awards (1979, 1980, 1981), two ASCAP Awards (1988, 1990), and one Gemini Award for Sword of Gideon (1987). He was also nominated for four additional Academy Awards for Anne of the Thousand Days (1969), The Day of the Dolphin (1973), Julia (1977), and Agnes of God (1985), four additional César Awards, three Golden Globe Awards, and one Genie Award for Black Robe (1991).
  The French newspaper Le Figaro named him "the Mozart of cinema." Delerue was the first composer to win three consecutive César Awards for Get Out Your Handkerchiefs (1979), Love on the Run (1980), and The Last Metro (1981). Georges Delerue was named Commander of Arts and Letters, one of France's highest honours.
  Georges Delerue was born 12 March 1925 in Roubaix, France to Georges Delerue and Marie Lhoest. He was raised in a musical household; his grandfather lead an amateur chorale group and his mother sang and played piano at family gatherings. By the age of fourteen he was playing clarinet at the local music conservatory. In 1940 he was forced to abandon his studies at the Turgot Institute in order to work at a factory to help support his family. He continued playing clarinet with local bands, eventually transitioning to piano under the instruction of Madame Picavet-Bacquart. He studied Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, and Grieg, and was particularly inspired by Richard Strauss. Following a long convalescence after being diagnosed with scoliosis, Georges decided to become a composer.
  
  wn.com/Georges_Delerue
• 
  Giorgio Moroder
  Hansjörg "Giorgio" Moroder, named on record sleeves often only Giorgio (born 26 April 1940, Urtijëi, South Tyrol, Italy) is an Italian (of Ladin ethnicity) record producer, songwriter and performer based in Los Angeles. When in Munich in the 1970s, he started his own record label called Oasis Records, which several years later became a subdivision of Casablanca Records. He collaborated with Donna Summer during the era of disco (including "Love to Love You Baby" and "I Feel Love") and is the founder of the former Musicland Studios in Munich, which was used as a recording studio by artists including the Electric Light Orchestra, Led Zeppelin, Queen and Elton John.
  In addition to producing several hits with Donna Summer, Moroder also produced a number of electronic disco hits for The Three Degrees, two albums for Sparks, a handful of songs on Bonnie Tyler's album Bitterblue as well as her 1985 single "Here She Comes" and a score of songs for performers including David Bowie, Irene Cara, Madleen Kane, Melissa Manchester, Blondie, Japan, and France Joli.
  
  wn.com/Giorgio_Moroder
• Henry Mancini
  Enrico Nicola "Henry" Mancini (April 16, 1924 – June 14, 1994) was an American composer, conductor and arranger, best remembered for his film and television scores. He won a record number of Grammy Awards (20), plus a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award posthumously in 1995. His best-known works include the jazz-idiom theme to The Pink Panther film series ("The Pink Panther Theme"), the Peter Gunn Theme from the television series, and back-to-back Academy Awards for the songs "Moon River" from the Blake Edwards film Breakfast at Tiffany's and "Days of Wine and Roses" from Edwards' film Days of Wine and Roses. He also composed the score of famous films such as Charade, The Great Race, Wait Until Dark or Silver Streak.
  Mancini was born in the Little Italy neighborhood of Cleveland, and grew up near Pittsburgh, in the steel town of West Aliquippa, Pennsylvania. His parents emigrated from the Abruzzo region of Italy. Mancini's father, Quinto, (born March 13, 1893, Scanno, Italy) was a steelworker, who made his only child begin piccolo lessons at the age of eight. When Mancini was 12 years old, he began piano lessons. Quinto and Henry played flute together in the Aliquippa Italian immigrant band, "Sons of Italy". After graduating from Aliquippa High School in 1942, Mancini attended the renowned Juilliard School of Music in New York. In 1943, after roughly one year at Juilliard, his studies were interrupted when he was drafted into the United States Army. In 1945, he participated in the liberation of a concentration camp in southern Germany.
  
  wn.com/Henry_Mancini
• Herbert Kretzmer
  Herbert Kretzmer OBE (born 5 October 1925) is a South African-born English journalist and lyric writer. He is perhaps best known as the lyricist for the English-language musical adaptation of Les Misérables.
  Kretzmer began his professional career writing documentary films and the commentary for a weekly cinema newsreel. However, he soon moved on to print journalism, initially as a reporter and feature writer for the Johannesburg Sunday Express. He relocated to London in the mid-1950s and pursued twin careers as journalist and lyric writer.
  After several years as a feature writer on the Daily Sketch, Kretzmer became a profile writer on the Sunday Dispatch and the Daily Express, interviewing John Steinbeck, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Sugar Ray Robinson, Louis Armstrong, Henry Miller, Cary Grant and Duke Ellington. In 1962, he became senior drama critic of the Daily Express: a post he held for 18 years, covering about 3,000 first nights.
  From 1979 to 1987, he wrote television criticism for the Daily Mail, winning in this capacity two national press awards, including TV Critic Of The Year.
  
  wn.com/Herbert_Kretzmer
• Horton Foote
  Albert Horton Foote, Jr. (March 14, 1916 – March 4, 2009) was an American playwright and screenwriter, perhaps best known for his screenplays for the 1962 film To Kill a Mockingbird and the 1983 film Tender Mercies, and his notable live television dramas during the Golden Age of Television. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1995 for his play The Young Man From Atlanta. In 1995, Foote was the inaugural recipient of the Austin Film Festival's Distinguished Screenwriter Award. In describing his 3-play work, "The Orphans' Home Cycle", the drama critic for the Wall Street Journal said this: "Foote, who died last March, left behind a masterpiece, one that will rank high among the signal achievements of American theater in the 20th century." In 2000, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts.
  Foote was born to Albert Horton Foote (1890-1973) and Harriet Gautier "Hallie" Brooks (1894-1974) in Wharton, Texas.His younger brothers were Thomas Brooks Foote (1921-1944) who died in aerial combat over Germany, and John Speed Foote (1923-1995).
  
  wn.com/Horton_Foote
• Ice Castles
  Ice Castles is a 1978 American romantic drama, starring Lynn-Holly Johnson and Robby Benson.
  It is the story of Alexis, a young figure skater, and her rise and fall from super stardom. Tragedy strikes when, following a freak accident, Lexie loses her sight, leaving her to hide away in the privacy of her own despair. She eventually perseveres and begins competing in figure skating again.
  The work was filmed on location in Colorado and Minnesota. Its theme song "Through the Eyes of Love." was made famous by Melissa Manchester. The director, Donald Wrye, filmed a remake of the movie in 2009. The movie, starring Taylor Firth, was released as a direct-to-DVD title on February 9, 2010, shortly before the 2010 Winter Olympics.
  Alexis "Lexie" Winston (Lynn-Holly Johnson) is a young girl from a small town who dreams of becoming a champion figure skater. Her high-school sweetheart, Nick (Robby Benson), dreams of being a hockey player.
  Coached by a family friend & former skater, Lexie enters a regional championship despite her father's protests. There, she is discovered by an elite coach (Jennifer Warren) who sees her potential despite a lack of training and qualifications at an advanced age for figure skaters. Despite initial protests from her father (Tom Skerritt) Lexie moves from her home in Waverly, Iowa to train at the legendary Broadmoor World Arena in Colorado Springs, Colorado. She is not well received by the other girls because of the attention lavished on her natural talent, but she proves herself and qualifies for the next level. Lexie's life is drastically changed; she becomes a star, alienates her high school sweetheart and begins dating an older man.
  
  wn.com/Ice_Castles
• Irwin Kostal
  Irwin Kostal (October 1, 1911 - November 23, 1994) was an American musical arranger of films and an orchestrator of Broadway musicals.
  Born in Chicago, Illinois, Kostal opted not to attend college, instead teaching himself musical arranging by studying the symphonic scores available at his local library. His first professional job was as a staff arranger for Design for Listening, an NBC radio show based in his hometown.
  After moving to New York City, Kostal was hired for Sid Caesar's popular variety series Your Show of Shows, and followed this with a stint at The Garry Moore Show. In the latter part of the decade he began working on Broadway, orchestrating for Shinbone Alley, The Music Man, Fiorello!, and West Side Story. His work on the latter resulted in his being hired to score the 1961 screen adaptation with Saul Chaplin, Johnny Green, and Sid Ramin. The quartet won both an Oscar and a Grammy Award for their contributions. Kostal later went on to collaborate with Saul Chaplin for the 1965 film adaptation of the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical The Sound of Music and won an Oscar for Best Music Scoring.
  
  wn.com/Irwin_Kostal
• 
  Isaac Hayes
  Isaac Lee Hayes, Jr. (August 20, 1942 – August 10, 2008) was an American songwriter, musician, singer, actor, and voice actor. Hayes was one of the creative influences behind the southern soul music label Stax Records, where he served both as an in-house songwriter and as a record producer, teaming with his partner David Porter during the mid-1960s. Hayes, Porter, Bill Withers, the Sherman Brothers, Steve Cropper, and John Fogerty were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2005 in recognition of writing scores of notable songs for themselves, the duo Sam & Dave, Carla Thomas, and others.
  The hit song "Soul Man", written by Hayes and Porter and first performed by "Sam & Dave", has been recognized as one of the most influential songs of the past 50 years by the Grammy Hall of Fame. It was also honored by The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, by Rolling Stone magazine, and by the RIAA as one of the Songs of the Century.
  During the late 1960s, Isaac Hayes also began recording music and he had several successful soul albums such as Hot Buttered Soul (1969) and Black Moses (1971). In addition to his work in popular music, he worked as a composer of musical scores for motion pictures.
  
  wn.com/Isaac_Hayes
• James Lapine
  James Lapine (born January 10, 1949) is an American stage director and librettist. He has won the Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical three times, for Into the Woods, Falsettos, and Passion. He has frequently collaborated with Stephen Sondheim and William Finn.
  Lapine was born in Mansfield, Ohio and graduated from Franklin and Marshall College in 1971. He did graduate study in both photography and graphic design at the California Institute of the Arts. He was a photographer, graphic designer, and architectural preservationist and taught design at the Yale School of Drama. At Yale University he wrote an adaptation and directed the Gertrude Stein play Photograph, which was produced Off-Broadway at the Open Space in SoHo in 1977. He proceeded to write and direct Off-Broadway plays and musicals, working with composer William Finn on March of the Falsettos in 1981 as director; the musical won the Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Off-Broadway Play. Frank Rich, the New York Times theatre critic, noted "Mr. Lapine's wildly resourceful staging."
  
  wn.com/James_Lapine
• Jason Robert Brown
  Jason Robert Brown (born June 20, 1970 in Ossining, New York) is an American musical theater composer, lyricist, and playwright. Brown's music sensibility fuses pop-rock stylings with theatrical lyrics. An accomplished pianist, Brown has often served as music director, conductor, orchestrator, and pianist for his own productions.
  Brown grew up in the suburbs of New York City, and attended the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York for 2 years. During summer, he attended French Woods Festival of the Performing Arts in Hancock, New York. He said Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street and Sunday in the Park with George were two of his biggest influences, and had it not been for them, he would have joined a rock band and tried to be Billy Joel.
  When Brown was 23, he and a friend were invited to see Stephen Sondheim's show Passion by Sondheim himself. Brown's friend, whom he refers to only as "Franz Liszt", wrote to Sondheim, and that is how they both got the tickets. Sondheim also invited them to dinner afterward. At the show, they sat in front of the New York Times' Frank Rich. They went to dinner, and after twenty minutes, Sondheim asked them what they thought of the show: they both were silent. Brown described the dinner after that moment as "many extremely awkward silences punctuated by bursts of frantic, desperate conversation about anything other than the slaughtered elephant in the room." Brown called mutual friend Daisy Prince the next day, asking if there might be any way to repair the damage after the dinner. She and her family decided that Brown should call Sondheim. Brown paraphrased what Sondheim said:
  
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• 
  Jerry Goldsmith
  Jerrald King "Jerry" Goldsmith (February 10, 1929 – July 21, 2004) was an American composer and conductor most known for his work in film and television scoring.
  He composed scores for such noteworthy films as The Sand Pebbles, Planet of the Apes, Patton, Chinatown, The Wind and the Lion, The Omen, The Boys from Brazil, Alien, Poltergeist, Gremlins, Hoosiers, Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Rudy, Air Force One, L.A. Confidential, Mulan, The Mummy, three Rambo films, and five Star Trek films. He was nominated for six Grammy Awards, nine Golden Globes, four BAFTAs, and seventeen Academy Awards. In 1977 he was awarded an Oscar for The Omen.
  He collaborated with some of the most prolific directors in film history, including Robert Wise (The Sand Pebbles, Star Trek: The Motion Picture), Howard Hawks (Rio Lobo), Otto Preminger (In Harm's Way), Joe Dante (Gremlins, The 'Burbs, Small Soldiers), Roman Polanski (Chinatown), Ridley Scott (Alien, Legend), Steven Spielberg (Poltergeist, Twilight Zone: The Movie), and Paul Verhoeven (Total Recall, Basic Instinct). However, his most notable collaboration was arguably that with Franklin J. Schaffner, for whom Goldsmith scored such films as Planet of the Apes, Patton, Papillon, and The Boys from Brazil.
  
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  Jerry Herman
  Jerry Herman (born July 10, 1931) is an American composer and lyricist, known for his work in Broadway musical theater. He composed the scores for the hit Broadway musicals Hello, Dolly!, Mame, and La Cage aux Folles. He has been nominated for the Tony Award five times, and won twice, for Hello, Dolly! and La Cage aux Folles. In 2009, Herman received the Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre. He is a recipient of the 2010 Kennedy Center Honors.
  
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  Jody Watley
  Jody Vanessa Watley (born January 30, 1959) is an American, singer, songwriter, record producer, and one of the defining iconic artists of the 80's whose music crosses genres from Pop, R&B, Jazz, Dance and Electronic Soul. In 1987, she won the Grammy Award for "Best New Artist." Along with Janet Jackson and Madonna, she ranks as one of MTV Video Music Awards most nominated female artists ever, with six nominations for her ‘Real Love’ video.
  To date, she is best known for her role in being a pioneer setting trends and standards for dance, style, music and video. Early in her solo career she was also noted for her commercial dance pop stylings with a funky edge. Jody Watley is also noted as being the first Pop/R&B singer to include a rapper on the specialized verse/bridge with their collaboration on "Friends" featuring Eric B. & Rakim, which would become a popular formula in commercial Pop/R&B/Hip-Hop.
  Watley has sold over 50 million albums and singles Worldwide. In 2008, she was the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from Billboard magazine, and was also prominently featured in the historic black issue of Vogue Italia in 2008.
  
  wn.com/Jody_Watley
• Joe Renzetti
  Joe Renzetti is a film composer and American session musician.
  Joseph Renzetti - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Joe Renzetti studied composing and orchestrating under Nicholas Flagello, NYC, Manhattan School of Music. He studied guitar with Dennis Sandole, Joe Sgro, Sal Benigo, Lenny Payton, and Frank Tacconelli a disciple of the Eddie Lang school.
  In the early 60s, as a result of Dick Clark and American Bandstand, originating from Philly, Cameo-Parkway records came into existence. Renzetti became Cameo Records' house guitarist, and played on the hits "Let's Twist Again", " Dee Dee Sharp's "Mashed Potato Time"", "South Street", The "Limbo Rock", "Palisades Park, and "Tallahassee Lassie".
  Fascinated by the advances in recording technology, and the profession of arranging for records, in 1963 Renzetti moved to New York. There, he arranged the top-ten records "Sunny", by Bobby Hebb, "Ninety Eight Point Six", by Keith, "Apple, Peaches, Pumpkin Pie", by Jay & the Techniques, and "Mandy", by Barry Manilow.
  
  wn.com/Joe_Renzetti
• Joe South
  Joe South (born Joseph Alfred Souter, February 28, 1940, in Atlanta, Georgia) is a multi-talented American singer-songwriter and guitarist.
  South opened his pop career in July 1958 with the novelty hit "The Purple People Eater Meets the Witch Doctor". Thereafter South's music grew increasingly serious.
  In 1959, South wrote two songs which were recorded by Gene Vincent: "I Might Have Known", which was on the album Sounds Like Gene Vincent (Capitol Records, 1959) and "Gone Gone Gone" which was included on the album The Crazy Beat of Gene Vincent (Capitol Records, 1963).
  He had met and was encouraged by Bill Lowery,^{[citation needed]} an Atlanta music publisher and radio personality. He began his recording career in Atlanta with National Recording Corporation, where he served as staff guitarist along with other NRC artists Ray Stevens and Jerry Reed. South's earliest recordings have been re-released by NRC on CD.
  South was also a prominent sideman, playing guitar on Aretha Franklin's "Chain of Fools",Tommy Roe's "Sheila", and Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde album. Some list South on the electric guitar part that was added to Simon & Garfunkel's first hit, "The Sounds of Silence", although others credit Al Gorgoni and/or Vinnie Bell instead.
  
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• Joel Hirschhorn
  Joel Hirschhorn, (December 18, 1937 – September 17, 2005), was an American songwriter. He won the Academy Award for Best Song on two occasions. He also wrote songs for a number of musicians, including Elvis Presley and Roy Orbison. Hirschhorn was born in the Bronx and attended the High School of Performing Arts in Manhattan. After graduating, Hirschhorn became a regular performer on New York’s nightclub circuit, both as a solo singer and as a member of the rock & roll band, The Highlighters.
  During the mid-1960s, Hirschhorn branched out into writing film soundtracks. The first score he wrote was for Who Killed Teddy Bear? (1965), which was directed by his friend Joseph Cates. He worked with Cates again the following year in The Fat Spy. However, the film was received so badly that Hirschhorn struggled to find work in Hollywood for a number of years afterwards.^{[citation needed]}
  Hirschhorn, along with songwriting partner Al Kasha, did not work on another film until 1970’s The Cheyenne Social Club, which was directed by Gene Kelly. It was the pair’s next effort, for The Poseidon Adventure (1972), that really made their name. "The Morning After", a song they wrote in a single evening, won them their first Oscar and also topped the Billboard chart.
  
  wn.com/Joel_Hirschhorn
• John Addison
  John Mervyn Addison (16 March 1920 – 7 December 1998) was a British composer best known for his film scores.
  Addison was born in Chobham, Surrey to a father who was a colonel in the British Army, and this influenced his choice of education at the Wellington College, Berkshire as a child. At the age of sixteen entered the Royal College of Music. He studied composition with Gordon Jacob, oboe with Léon Goossens, and clarinet with Frederick Thurston. This education ended in 1939 with service in World War II. Addison served with the British XXX Corps in the 23rd Hussars. He was a tank officer in the Battle of Normandy and wounded at Caen, later participating in Operation Market Garden. At the end of the war, he returned to London to teach composition at the Royal College of Music.
  Addison is best known for his film scores. He won an Academy Award and a Grammy Award in the Best Original Score from a Motion Picture or Television Show category for the music to the 1963 film, Tom Jones. He also won a BAFTA Award for A Bridge Too Far (1977). His other film scores included A Taste of Honey (1961), Smashing Time (1967), Sleuth (1972), Swashbuckler (1976) and the television series Centennial (1978).
  
  wn.com/John_Addison
• John Kander
  John Harold Kander (born March 18, 1927) is the American composer of a number of musicals as part of the songwriting team of Kander and Ebb.
  Kander was born in Kansas City, Missouri, the son of Bernice (née Aaron) and Harold S. Kander. Kander attended The Pembroke Country-Day School and Oberlin College before earning a Master's degree at Columbia University where he was a protégé of Douglas Moore and studied composition with Jack Beeson.
  Kander began his Broadway career as substitute rehearsal pianist for West Side Story. The stage manager for West Side Story then asked Kander to play the auditions for her next show, Gypsy. During the auditions, Kander met the choreographer, Jerome Robbins, who suggested that Kander compose the dance music for the show in 1959. After that experience, he wrote dance arrangements for Irma la Douce in 1960.
  His first produced musical was A Family Affair, written with James and William Goldman. He met lyricist Fred Ebb in 1962 and began a songwriting collaboration that would last for more than four decades. Later that year rising star Barbra Streisand recorded two of the duo's songs, "My Coloring Book" and "I Don't Care Much." In 1965, Kander and Ebb landed their first show on Broadway, Flora the Red Menace, produced by Hal Prince, directed by George Abbott, and with book by George Abbott and Robert Russell,^{[disambiguation needed ]} in which Liza Minnelli made her initial Broadway appearance. Kander and Ebb have since been associated with writing material for both Liza Minnelli and Chita Rivera, and have produced special material for their appearances live and on television.
  
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  John Legend
  John Roger Stephens (born December 28, 1978), better known by his stage name John Legend, is an American singer-songwriter and actor. He has won nine Grammy Awards, and in 2007, he received the special Starlight award from the Songwriters Hall of Fame.
  Prior to the release of his debut album, Stephens' career gained momentum through a series of successful collaborations with multiple established artists. Stephens added his voice to those of other artists, assisting in them reaching chart-topper hits. He lent his voice to Kanye West's All of the Lights, on Slum Village's "Selfish" and Dilated Peoples' "This Way". Other artists included Jay-Z's "Encore", and he sang backing vocals on Alicia Keys' 2003 song "You Don't Know My Name" and Fort Minor's "High Road." Stephens played piano on Lauryn Hill's "Everything Is Everything."
  Stephens was born on December 28, 1978, in Springfield, Ohio. He is the son of Phyllis, a seamstress, and John Mills, a factory worker and former National Guardsman. Throughout his childhood, Stephens was homeschooled on and off by his mother. At the age of four, he began playing the piano and at the age of seven, he performed with his church choir. When he was ten, his parents divorced, causing his mother to suffer a breakdown. At the age of 12, Stephens attended North High School, from which he graduated four years later. He graduated salutatorian.
  
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  John Williams
  John Towner Williams (born February 8, 1932) is an American composer, conductor, and pianist. In a career spanning almost six decades, he has composed some of the most recognizable film scores in the history of motion pictures, including the Star Wars saga, Jaws, Superman, the Indiana Jones films, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Hook, Jurassic Park, Schindler's List, War Horse, Home Alone and the first three Harry Potter films. He has had a long association with director Steven Spielberg, composing the music for all but two (Duel and The Color Purple) of Spielberg's major feature films.
  Other notable works by Williams include theme music for four Olympic Games, NBC Sunday Night Football, the NBC Nightly News, the rededication of the Statue of Liberty, and the television series Lost in Space. Williams has also composed numerous classical concerti, and he served as the principal conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra from 1980 to 1993; he is now the orchestra's conductor laureate.
  Williams has won five Academy Awards, four Golden Globe Awards, seven BAFTA Awards, and 21 Grammy Awards. With 47 Academy Award nominations, Williams is the second most nominated person, after Walt Disney. John Williams was honored with the prestigious Richard Kirk award at the 1999 BMI Film and TV Awards. The award is given annually to a composer who has made significant contributions to film and television music. Williams was inducted into the Hollywood Bowl Hall of Fame in 2000, and was a recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors in 2004.
  
  wn.com/John_Williams
• Johnny Green
  Johnny Green (10 October 1908 – 15 May 1989) was an American songwriter, composer, musical arranger, and conductor. He was given the nickname "Beulah" by colleague Conrad Salinger. His most famous song was one of his earliest, "Body and Soul". Green was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1972.
  John Waldo Green was born in New York City, the son of musical parents. He attended Horace Mann School and the New York Military Academy, and was accepted by Harvard at the age of 15, entering the University in 1924. His musical tutors were Herman Wasserman, Ignace Hilsberg and Walter Spalding. Between semesters, Bandleader Guy Lombardo heard his Harvard Gold Coast Orchestra and hired him to create dance arrangements for his nationally famous orchestra. His first song hit, Coquette (1928), was written for Lombardo (with Carmen Lombardo, Guy's brother, and lyricist Gus Kahn). Green was educated in music, history, economics, and government. His instruments were the piano and the trombone, although he abandoned the latter after college.
  
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  Johnny Mercer
  John Herndon "Johnny" Mercer (November 18, 1909 – June 25, 1976) was an American lyricist, songwriter and singer. He is best known as a lyricist, but he also composed music. He was also a popular singer who recorded his own songs as well as those written by others. From the mid-1930s through the mid-1950s, many of the songs Mercer wrote and performed were among the most popular hits of the time. He wrote the lyrics to more than fifteen hundred songs, including compositions for movies and Broadway shows. He received nineteen Academy Award nominations, and won four. Mercer was also a co-founder of Capitol Records.
  Mercer was born in Savannah, Georgia. His father, George Anderson Mercer, was a prominent attorney and real estate developer, and his mother, Lillian Elizabeth (née Ciucevich), George Mercer’s secretary and then second wife, was the daughter of Croatian-Irish immigrants who came to America in the 1850s. Lillian's father was a merchant seaman who ran the Union blockade during the U.S. Civil War. Mercer was George's fourth son, first by Lillian. His great-grandfather was Confederate General Hugh Weedon Mercer and he was a direct descendant of American Revolutionary War General Hugh Mercer, a Scottish soldier-physician who died at the Battle of Princeton. Mercer was also a distant cousin of General George S. Patton. The construction of Mercer House in Savannah was started by General Hugh Weedon Mercer in 1860 (although never finished by him; the next owners of the house finished it), later the home of Jim Williams, whose trial for murder was the centerpiece of John Berendt's book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, although neither the General nor Johnny ever lived there.
  
  wn.com/Johnny_Mercer
• Jonathan Larson
  Jonathan Larson (February 4, 1960 – January 25, 1996) was an American composer and playwright noted for the serious social issues of multiculturalism, addiction, and homophobia explored in his work. Typical examples of his use of these themes are found in his works, Rent and tick, tick... BOOM!. He received three posthumous Tony Awards and a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for Drama for the rock opera Rent.
  Larson was born to Jewish parents, Allan and Nanette Larson, in White Plains, New York. He was exposed to the performing arts, especially music and theatre from an early age, as he played the trumpet, tuba, was involved in his school's choir, and took formal piano lessons. His early musical influences were his favorite rock musicians such as Elton John, The Beatles, The Doors, The Who, and Billy Joel, as well as the classic composers of musical theatre, especially Stephen Sondheim. Larson was also involved in acting in high school, performing in lead roles in various productions at White Plains High School.
  
  wn.com/Jonathan_Larson
• Jonathan Tunick
  Jonathan Tunick (born April 19, 1938, New York City, New York) is an American orchestrator, musical director, and composer, one of eleven people to have won all four major American show business awards: the Tony Awards, Academy Awards, Emmy Awards and Grammy Awards. He has worked on most of the musicals of Stephen Sondheim, starting in 1970 with Company and ending with the 2010-11 revival of Follies.
  He graduated from the LaGuardia Performing Arts High School, and holds degrees from Bard College and the Juilliard School. Tunick's principal instrument is the clarinet.
  Much of his work has arisen from his involvement in theatre, and he is associated especially with the musicals of Stephen Sondheim. Sondheim said of Tunick's work: " 'I think he's tops'..." and further noted that "Tunick is a standout in his field not only because of his musicianship and imagination, but primarily because of 'his great sensitivity to theatrical atmosphere.' "
  Tunick also has a band, the "Broadway Moonlighters", which played at Birdland in March 2012 and in 2008 with Barbara Cook as his special guest. He has worked as an arranger and/or con­ductor on recordings with Judy Collins, Cleo Laine, Kiri Te Kanawa, Itzhak Perlman, Placido Domingo, Johnny Mathis, Barbra Streisand, Paul McCartney and Bernadette Peters. In his review of the Bernadette Peters recording Bernadette Peters Loves Rodgers and Hammerstein (Angel Records, 2002), John Kenrick wrote: "Jonathan Tunick provides the brilliant arrangements." Tunick won the Grammy Award as "Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocalist(s)/Best Background Arrangement" for his work on the song "No One Is Alone" from the Cleo Laine album Cleo Laine Sings Sondheim (RCA Victor, 1987).
  
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  José Feliciano
  José Feliciano (born September 10, 1945) is a Puerto Rican singer, virtuoso guitarist and composer known for many international hits including the 1970 Christmas single "Feliz Navidad".
  Feliciano was born in Lares, Puerto Rico, on September 10, 1945. Left permanently blind at birth as a result of congenital glaucoma, Feliciano was first exposed to music at age three and would play on a tin cracker can while accompanying his uncle playing the Cuatro. When he was five, his family moved to Spanish Harlem, New York City, and at age nine, he played the Teatro Puerto Rico in the Bronx. He started his musical life playing the accordion until his father and family friend, Benjamin Borges, gave him his first guitar in a brown paper bag. He played every chance he had by himself in his room for up to 14 hours a day listening to 1950s rock'n'roll records, classical guitarists such as Andrés Segovia, and jazz players such as Wes Montgomery. He later had classical lessons with Harold Morris, who earlier had been a student of Segovia.
  
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  Julie Newmar
  Julie Newmar (born August 16, 1933, Los Angeles, California) is an American actress, dancer and singer. Her most famous role is Catwoman in the Batman television series.
  She was born in Los Angeles as Julia Chalene Newmeyer, the eldest of three children born to Don and Helen (née Jesmer) Newmeyer. Her father was head of the Physical Education Department at Los Angeles City College and had played American football professionally in the 1920s with the Los Angeles Buccaneers of the first American Football League. Her brother is John Newmeyer, Harvard Ph.D, a San Francisco-based epidemiologist, author, and Napa Valley winemaker.
  Newmar was a "dancer-assassin" in Slaves of Babylon (1953) and the "gilded girl" in Serpent of the Nile (1953), in which she was clad in gold paint. She danced in several other films, including The Band Wagon and Demetrius and the Gladiators, and was a ballerina with the Los Angeles Opera. She also worked as a choreographer and dancer for Universal Studios.
  Her first major role, billed as "Julie Newmeyer", was as "Dorcas", one of the brides in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954). Her three minute Broadway appearance as the leggy "Stupefyin' Jones" in the musical Li'l Abner in 1956 led to a reprise in the 1959 film version. She was also the female lead in a low-budget comedy, The Rookie. She also featured in many further films including the 1969 production, Mackenna's Gold.
  
  wn.com/Julie_Newmar
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  Keith Carradine
  Keith Ian Carradine (born August 8, 1949) is an American actor who has had success on stage, film and television. He is perhaps best known for his roles as Wild Bill Hickok in the HBO series Deadwood and FBI agent Frank Lundy in Dexter. In addition, he is a Golden Globe and Academy Award winning songwriter. As a member of the Carradine family, he is part of an acting "dynasty" that began with his father, John Carradine.
  Keith Carradine was born in San Mateo, California. He is the son of actress and artist Sonia Sorel (née Henius) and actor John Carradine. His paternal half-brothers are Bruce and David Carradine. His maternal half-brother is Michael Bowen, and his full brothers are Christopher and Robert Carradine. His maternal great-grandfather was biochemist Max Henius, and his maternal great-grandmother was the sister of historian Johan Ludvig Heiberg.
  Carradine's childhood was difficult. He said that his father drank and his mother “was a manic depressive paranoid schizophrenic catatonic — she had it all.” His parents were divorced in 1957, when he was eight years old. A bitter custody battle led to his father gaining custody of him and his brothers, Christopher and Robert, after the children had spent three months in a home for abused children as wards of the court. Keith said of the experience, "It was like being in jail. There were bars on the windows, and we were only allowed to see our parents through glass doors. It was very sad. We would stand there on either side of the glass door crying." He was raised primarily by his maternal grandmother, and he rarely saw either of his parents. His mother was not permitted to see him for eight years following the custody settlement.
  
  wn.com/Keith_Carradine
• Ken Darby
  Kenneth Lorin Darby (May 13, 1909 – January 24, 1992) was an American composer, vocal arranger, lyricist, and conductor. His film scores were recognized with three Academy Awards and one Grammy Award.
  Kenneth Lorin Darby was born in Hebron, Nebraska, on May 13, 1909, to Lorin Edward Darby and Clara Alice Powell.
  Ken Darby's choral group, The Ken Darby Singers, sang backup for Bing Crosby on the original 1942 Decca Records studio recording of "White Christmas." They also sang on the first album ever made of the songs from The Wizard of Oz, in 1940, a film on which Darby had worked. However, the album was a studio cast recording, not a true soundtrack album, although it did feature Judy Garland, and it did not use the film's original arrangements.
  He also performed as part of a vocal quartet, "The King's Men", who recorded several songs with Paul Whiteman's orchestra in the mid-'30s, and were the featured vocalists on the Fibber McGee and Molly radio program from 1940 through 1953. They also participated on the soundtracks of several MGM films, including The Wizard Of Oz and occasional Tom and Jerry cartoons.
  
  wn.com/Ken_Darby
• Ken Thorne
  Kenneth Thorne (born 26 January 1925) is a British television and film score composer.
  Thorne was born in East Dereham, a town in the English county of Norfolk. Thorne began his musical career as a pianist with the big bands of England during the 1940s, playing at night clubs and the dance halls. At age 27, Thorne decided to seriously study composition with private tutors at Cambridge and later studied the organ for five years in London.
  Thorne began composing scores for films in 1948. Thorne was considered Richard Lester's composer of choice since their first work together on Help!.
  When Henry Mancini was scoring Blake Edwards' The Party with Peter Sellers, Thorne composed the soundtrack to Inspector Clouseau. He was hired for Richard Lester's films Superman II and III with instructions to reuse the music by John Williams and recompose them for the sequels, also adding some original work. He also did the music score for The Monkees movie Head. Since the 1980s, Ken Thorne has mainly focused his work for TV.
  
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  Lanford Wilson
  Lanford Wilson (April 13, 1937 – March 24, 2011) was an American playwright who helped to advance the Off-Off-Broadway theater movement. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1980, was elected in 2001 to the Theater Hall of Fame, and in 2004 was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was nominated for three Tony Awards.
  Wilson was raised in Missouri by his mother, but in 1956 he moved to California, where he worked and attended college. There, Wilson lived with his father, who did not accept Wilson's homosexuality, and so, in 1957, he moved to Chicago, where he worked as a graphic artist and studied playwriting. In 1962, he moved to New York and began to write plays for Off-Off-Broadway theatres. His 1964 short play, The Madness of Lady Bright, was his first significant success and led to further works treating gay identity and other social and romantic issues throughout the 1960s. In 1969, he was a co-founder of Circle Repertory Company, for whom he wrote many plays in the 1970s. His 1973 play, The Hot l Baltimore, was the company's first major hit with both audiences and critics; its Off-Broadway run exceeded 1,000 performances.
  
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  Lauryn Hill
  Lauryn Noelle Hill (born May 26, 1975) is an American singer-songwriter, rapper, record producer, and actress.
  Early in her career, she established her reputation as a member of the Fugees. In 1998, she launched her solo career with the release of the commercially successful and critically acclaimed album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. The recording earned Hill 5 Grammy Awards, including the coveted Album of the Year and Best New Artist.
  Following the success of her debut album, Hill largely dropped out of public view, in part due to her displeasure with fame and the music industry. After a four-year hiatus, she released MTV Unplugged No. 2.0, a live recording of "deeply personal songs" performed mostly solo with an acoustic guitar. In more recent years, she has recorded songs for soundtracks and mixtapes, as well as performing live at several music festivals. Hill has 6 children, five of whom are with Rohan Marley, one of reggae musician Bob Marley's sons.
  Lauryn Hill was born in South Orange, New Jersey of Haitian and African-American descent,^{[citation needed]} the second of two children born to high school English teacher Valerie Hill and computer programmer Mal Hill. As a child, Hill listened to her parents' Motown 1960s soul records. Music was a central part of the Hill home. Mal Hill sang at weddings, Valerie played the piano, and Lauryn's older brother Malaney played the saxophone, guitar, drums, harmonica, and piano. In 1988, Hill appeared as an Amateur Night contestant on It's Showtime at the Apollo. She sang her own version of Smokey Robinson's song "Who's Lovin' You?", where she was booed tremendously, but persevered and ended up with audience applause.
  
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  LeAnn Rimes
  Margaret LeAnn Rimes Cibrian (born August 28, 1982), best known as LeAnn Rimes, is an American country/pop singer. She is known for her rich vocals and her rise to fame as an eight-year-old champion on the original Ed McMahon version of Star Search, followed by the release of the Bill Mack song "Blue" when she was 13 to become the youngest country music star since Tanya Tucker in 1972.
  Rimes made her breakthrough into country music in 1996 with her debut album, Blue, which reached #1 on the Top Country Albums chart and was certified multiplatinum in sales by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). The album's eponymous leadoff single, "Blue," was originally intended to be recorded by Patsy Cline in the early 1960s. It became a Top 10 hit and Rimes gained national acclaim for her similarity to Cline's vocal style. When she released her sophomore studio effort in 1997, You Light up My Life: Inspirational Songs, she moved towards country pop material, which set the trend for a string of albums released into the next decade.
  
  wn.com/LeAnn_Rimes
• Lennie Hayton
  Leonard George "Lennie" Hayton (14 February 1908 – 24 April 1971) was an American Jewish composer, conductor and arranger. His trademark was the wearing of a captain’s hat, which he always wore at a rakish angle. He was initially a pianist in jazz groups led by Frankie Trumbauer, Bix Beiderbecke, Red Nichols, Joe Venuti and others. He also played with the Paul Whiteman Orchestra. Hayton composed "Apple Blossoms" with Joe Venuti, Frankie Trumbauer, and Eddie Lang. His other compositions included "Flying Fingers", "The Stage is Set", "Mood Hollywood" with Jimmy Dorsey, and "Midnight Mood". Hayton also co-arranged the Hoagy Carmichael composition "Stardust" with Artie Shaw, for Shaw's recording of it in 1940, for Bluebird records.
  He became musical director for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1940 and guided it through its prime years as forerunner of the movie musical. Up until his retirement from the post in 1953, he racked up four Academy Award nominations: for the Judy Garland musicals The Harvey Girls (1946) and The Pirate (1948). Hayton won the Academy Award for music for On the Town in 1950. Lennie Hayton also arranged the music for Singin' in the Rain in 1952. Hayton notched up two more nominations—one in 1968 for the unsuccessful Julie Andrews musical Star! and his last the following year for the Barbra Streisand vehicle Hello, Dolly!, which brought him his second and final Oscar. In 1970, Hayton arranged Frank Sinatra's first attempt at the George Harrison composition Something. However, Sinatra later began using a Nelson Riddle arrangement of the song in concert performances and in 1979 he put the Riddle version on record.^{[citation needed]}
  
  wn.com/Lennie_Hayton
• Leonard Rosenman
  Leonard Rosenman (September 7, 1924 – March 4, 2008) was an American film, television and concert composer.
  Leonard Rosenman was born in Brooklyn, New York. After service in the Pacific with the Army Air Forces in World War II, he earned a bachelor's degree in music from the University of California, Berkeley. He also studied composition with Arnold Schoenberg, Roger Sessions and Luigi Dallapiccola.
  Rosenman composed the scores for such films as East of Eden (1955), Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Fantastic Voyage (1966), The Lord of the Rings (1978), Cross Creek (1983) and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986). He wrote incidental music for such television series as The Defenders, The Twilight Zone, Gibbsville and Marcus Welby, M.D. He also wrote the theme and almost all of the incidental music used for the entire run of the 1960s World War II television series Combat!. In the 1970s he composed Bass Concerto Chamber Music 4 for bassist Buell Neidlinger and four string quartets with a second bass.
  
  wn.com/Leonard_Rosenman
• Lesley Gore
  Lesley Gore (born Lesley Sue Goldstein; May 2, 1946) is an American singer. She is perhaps best known for her 1963 pop hit "It's My Party", which she recorded at the age of 16. Following the hit, she became one of the most recognized teen pop singers of the 1960s.
  Gore was born in New York City, New York. She was raised in Tenafly, New Jersey, in a Jewish family. Her younger brother Michael, was an Oscar winner for Best Original Song for the theme song of Fame. Her father, Leo Gore, was a wealthy manufacturer of children's clothes and swimwear.
  Lesley was a junior at the Dwight School for Girls in nearby Englewood when "It's My Party" became a #1 hit. It was later nominated for a Grammy Award for rock and roll recording. It sold over one million copies, and was awarded a gold disc.
  Gore's first hit was followed by many others, including: "Judy's Turn to Cry" (US #5), the sequel to "It's My Party"; "She's a Fool" (US #5); the protofeminist million-selling "You Don't Own Me", which held at #2 for three weeks behind The Beatles' "I Want To Hold Your Hand"; "That's the Way Boys Are" (US #12); "Maybe I Know" (US #14/UK #20); "Look of Love" (US #27); and Grammy-nominated "Sunshine, Lollipops, and Rainbows" (US #13), from the 1965 movie "Ski Party". Her record producer was Quincy Jones, who would later become one of the most famous producers in American music.
  
  wn.com/Lesley_Gore
• Lionel Newman
  Lionel Newman (January 4, 1916 - February 3, 1989) was an American conductor, pianist, and film and television composer. He was the brother of Alfred Newman and Emil Newman, uncle of Randy Newman, David Newman and Thomas Newman, and grandfather of Joey Newman.
  Born in New Haven, Connecticut, Newman was one of ten children, the youngest of seven boys, born to Russian immigrant Jewish parents. While the family had little money, the children's mother, Luba, was a strong woman who encouraged them to achieve. Newman migrated to Hollywood where, at the age of 16, he began conducting for impresario Earl Carroll. This was where he met his future wife, Beverly Carroll, an Earl Carroll Vanity’s showgirl, and niece of the impresario. Newman had formal training in New York, and after moving to Los Angeles, he continued his studies with Joseph Achron and Mario Castelnuevo-Tedesco.
  In the 1930s, Newman earned his stripes conducting national tours and working as the piano accompanist for Mae West. She used to scold him for holding his hands too high in the pit saying, "I'm the show, Newman, not you."
  
  wn.com/Lionel_Newman
• 
  Liza Minnelli
  Liza May Minnelli (born March 12, 1946) is an American actress and singer. She is the daughter of singer and actress Judy Garland and film director Vincente Minnelli.
  Already established as a nightclub singer and musical theatre actress, she first attracted critical acclaim for her dramatic performances in the movies The Sterile Cuckoo (1969), and Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon (1970); Minnelli then rose to international stardom for her appearance as Sally Bowles in the 1972 film version of the Broadway musical Cabaret, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role. She later made a great star turn in Arthur (1981), co-starring with Dudley Moore (in the title role) and Sir John Gielgud, who won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor as Arthur's snobbish but loveable butler.
  While film projects such as Lucky Lady, A Matter of Time and New York, New York were less favorably received than her stage roles, Minnelli became one of the most versatile, highly regarded and best-selling entertainers in television, beginning with Liza with a Z in 1972, and on stage in the Broadway productions of Flora the Red Menace, The Act and The Rink. Minnelli also toured internationally and did shows such as Liza Minnelli: At Carnegie Hall, Frank, Liza & Sammy: The Ultimate Event, and Liza Live from Radio City Music Hall.
  
  wn.com/Liza_Minnelli
• Lynn Ahrens
  Lynn Ahrens (born October 1, 1948) is an American writer and lyricist for the musical theatre, television and film. She has collaborated with Stephen Flaherty for many years. She won the Tony Award, Drama Desk Award, and Outer Critics Circle Award for the Broadway musical Ragtime and was nominated for two Academy Awards and two Golden Globe Awards for the animated Twentieth Century Fox film "Anastasia." She is a mainstay writer for ABC-TV's "Schoolhouse Rock."
  Ahrens was born in New York City, graduated from Neptune High School on the Jersey shore, and graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in Journalism and English. She is Jewish. She began a career in advertising as a copywriter but was invited to work on a children's television show, and began writing songs for "Schoolhouse Rock". She subsequently worked as a freelance composer and singer of commercial music, and wrote and produced shows for children's television. She began writing for the musical theater in 1982.
  Ahrens met Stephen Flaherty at the BMI Workshop in 1982 and they started working together the following year. Their first musical together was Lucky Stiff, which premiered Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons in April 1988. Their next musical was Once on This Island, which premiered on Broadway in 1990 and which was nominated for eight Tony Awards. My Favorite Year opened at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre in Lincoln Center in October 1992 but ran for only 36 performances.
  
  wn.com/Lynn_Ahrens
• 
  Marc Cohn
  Marc Craig Cohn (born July 5, 1959) is an American folk rock singer-songwriter and musician.
  Cohn was born in Cleveland, Ohio. He graduated from Beachwood High School in Beachwood, a Cleveland suburb. He then attended Oberlin College.
  Cohn is married to ABC News journalist Elizabeth Vargas, whom he met at the 1999 U.S. Open after being introduced by Andre Agassi. They have two sons: Zachary Raphael, who was born on January 31, 2003, and Samuel Wyatt, who was born on August 16, 2006. Cohn has two other children from a previous marriage, a son, Max and a daughter, Emily.
  On August 7, 2005, Cohn was shot in the head during an attempted carjacking in Denver, Colorado, following a concert with Suzanne Vega. The bullet struck him in the temple but did not penetrate his skull. Cohn was hospitalized and released the next day. His remaining concerts on the tour were canceled.
  
  wn.com/Marc_Cohn
• Margaret Edson
  Margaret Edson (born 4 July 1961, Washington, D.C.) is an American playwright. As a child, she wrote and acted in amateur plays with neighborhood friend Julia Louis-Dreyfus. She graduated with a B.A. in Renaissance History from Smith College, and received a master's in English literature from Georgetown University. Her jobs have included being a bicycle shop sales clerk and a volunteer ESL teacher.
  Edson's first play was Wit, first produced in 1995 at South Coast Repertory in California, about a John Donne scholar who is hospitalized for and dying of ovarian cancer. Edson did use her work experience in a hospital as part of the background in writing the play. At the time of its first New York production in late 1998, Edson was a kindergarten teacher at Centennial Place Elementary School (Atlanta, Georgia). The play won her the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The award brought her a large amount of publicity, including an interview on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS. Edson has written a second play, Satisfied, whose subject is "country-gospel radio in Kentucky"--still, as of April 2008, unproduced.
  
  wn.com/Margaret_Edson
• 
  Mariah Carey
  Mariah Carey (born March 27, 1970) is an American singer, songwriter, record producer, and actress. She made her recording debut in 1990 under the guidance of Columbia Records executive Tommy Mottola, and released her self-titled debut studio album, Mariah Carey. The album went multi-platinum and spawned four consecutive number one singles, on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart. Following her marriage to Mottola in 1993, a series of hit records, including Emotions (1991), Music Box (1993) and Merry Christmas (1994), established her position as Columbia's highest-selling act. Daydream (1995), made music history when the second single, "One Sweet Day" a duet with Boyz II Men, spent a record sixteen weeks on top of the Billboard Hot 100, and remains the longest running number one song in US chart history. During the recording of the album Carey began to deviate from her pop background, and slowly traversed into R&B and Hip-hop. After her separation from Mottola, this musical change was evident with the release of Butterfly (1997).
  
  wn.com/Mariah_Carey
• Marilyn Bergman
  Marilyn Bergman (born November 10, 1929) is a composer, songwriter and author.
  She was born Marilyn Katz in Brooklyn, New York and studied psychology and English at New York University. She and her husband Alan Bergman, whom she married in 1958, were born in the same hospital and raised in the same Brooklyn neighborhood, but their first meeting did not take place till each had relocated to Los Angeles. Together they have written the music and lyrics for numerous television shows, films, and stage musicals. One of their early successes was "Sleep Warm" the title track to Dean Martin's 1959 album on which Frank Sinatra was the 'guest' conductor. Sinatra sang his first of their compositions, "Love Looks So Well On You", on Sinatra Sings of Love and Things, which came out in 1962.
  In 1983, the couple became the first songwriters ever to have written three of the five tunes nominated for an Academy Award for Best Song - "How Do You Keep the Music Playing?" from Best Friends, "It Might Be You" from Tootsie (with Dave Grusin), and "If We Were in Love" from Yes, Giorgio (with John Williams).
  
  wn.com/Marilyn_Bergman
• 
  Marsha Norman
  Marsha Norman (born September 21, 1947) is an American playwright, screenwriter, and novelist. She received the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play 'night, Mother. She wrote the book and lyrics for such Broadway musicals as The Secret Garden, for which she won a Tony Award and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Book of a Musical, and The Red Shoes, as well as the libretto for the musical The Color Purple.
  Norman was born in Louisville, Kentucky. As a child, she read, played the piano and had an imaginary friend named Bettering. She later began attending productions by the newly-founded Actor's Theatre of Louisville. After graduating from Agnes Scott College with a degree in philosophy, she began working as a journalist for The Louisville Times newspaper, and writing for Kentucky Educational Television. She also taught young children and adolescents in mental institutions and hospitals. These were perhaps her biggest influence on her writing, especially a 13-year-old girl who influenced her play Getting Out. She also taught English at the J. Graham Brown School in Louisville.
  
  wn.com/Marsha_Norman
• Martin Charnin
  Martin Charnin (born November 24, 1934) is an American lyricist, writer, and theatre director. Charnin's best-known work is as conceiver, director and lyricist of the hit musical Annie.
  Born in New York City, he graduated from The High School of Music & Art and then from The Cooper Union, where he got his BFA. Charnin began his theatrical career as a performer, appearing as "Big Deal", one of the Jets in the original production of West Side Story. He played the role for 1000 performances on Broadway and on the road. After completing his duties in West Side Story, he wrote music and lyrics for numerous off-Broadway and Cabaret revues, many of them for Julius Monk. He then went on to write, direct, and produce nightclub acts for Dionne Warwick, Nancy Wilson, Mary Travers, Larry Kert, Jose Ferrer, and Leslie Uggams. His first Broadway musical was in 1963, as the lyricist for Hot Spot starring Judy Holliday, with music by Mary Rodgers.
  
  wn.com/Martin_Charnin
• 
  Marvin Hamlisch
  Marvin Frederick Hamlisch (born June 2, 1944) is an American composer. He is one of only eleven people to have been awarded Emmys, Grammys, Oscars, and a Tony. He is also one of only two people to have won those four prizes and also a Pulitzer Prize (the other is Richard Rodgers). Hamlisch has also won two Golden Globes.
  Hamlisch was born in New York City to Viennese Jewish parents: Lilly Schachter and Max Hamlisch. His father was an accordionist and bandleader. Hamlisch was a child prodigy, and by age five he began mimicking music he heard on the radio on the piano. A few months before he turned seven, in 1951, he was accepted into what is now the Juilliard School Pre-College Division. His first job was as a rehearsal pianist for Funny Girl with Barbra Streisand. Shortly after that, he was hired by producer Sam Spiegel to play piano at Spiegel's parties. This connection led to his first film score, The Swimmer. His favorite musicals growing up were My Fair Lady, Gypsy, West Side Story, and Bye Bye Birdie.
  
  wn.com/Marvin_Hamlisch
• 
  Matt Damon
  Matthew Paige "Matt" Damon (born October 8, 1970) is an American actor, screenwriter, and philanthropist whose career was launched following the success of the film Good Will Hunting (1997) from a screenplay he co-wrote with friend Ben Affleck. The pair won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and a Golden Globe Award for Best Screenplay for their work. Damon alone received multiple Best Actor nominations, including an Academy Award for his lead performance in the film.
  Damon has since starred in commercially successful films such as Saving Private Ryan (1998), the Ocean's trilogy, and the Bourne series, while also gaining critical acclaim for his performances in dramas such as Syriana (2005), The Good Shepherd (2006), and The Departed (2006). He garnered a Golden Globe nomination for portraying the title character in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in Invictus (2009). He is one of the top 40 highest grossing actors of all time. In 2007, Damon received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and was named Sexiest Man Alive by People magazine. Damon has been actively involved in charitable work, including the ONE Campaign, H2O Africa Foundation, and Water.org.
  
  wn.com/Matt_Damon
• Maurice Jarre
  Maurice-Alexis Jarre (13 September 1924 – 28 March 2009) was a French composer and conductor. His son is the electronic composer Jean Michel Jarre.
  Although he composed several concert works, Jarre is best known for his film scores, particularly for his collaborations with film director David Lean. Jarre composed the scores to all of Lean's films since Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Other notable scores include The Train (1964), Mohammad, Messenger of God (1976), Witness (1985) and Ghost (1990).
  Jarre was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Three of his compositions spent a total of 42 weeks on the UK singles chart chart; the biggest hit was "Somewhere My Love" (to his tune "Lara's Theme", with lyrics by Paul Francis Webster) by the Michael Sammes Singers, which reached Number 14 in 1966 and spent 38 weeks on the chart.
  Jarre was a three time Academy Award winner, for Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Doctor Zhivago (1965), and A Passage to India (1984), all of which were directed by David Lean. He was Oscar nominated a total of eight times.
  
  wn.com/Maurice_Jarre
• Maury Yeston
  Maury Yeston (born October 23, 1945) is an American composer, lyricist, educator and musicologist.
  He is known for writing the music and lyrics to Broadway musicals, including Nine in 1982, and Titanic in 1997, both of which won Tony Awards for best musical and best score. He also won a Drama Desk Award for Nine. Yeston also wrote a significant amount of the music and most of the lyrics to the Tony-nominated musical Grand Hotel in 1989, which was nominated for best score. His musical version of the novel The Phantom of the Opera called Phantom (not to be confused with Andrew Lloyd Webber's version) has enjoyed numerous productions in the U.S. and around the world. He has also written a number of other Off-Broadway musicals, a song cycle, a Cello Concerto, and other pieces.
  Yeston serves on the Board of the Songwriters Hall of Fame. He is also President of the Kleban Foundation, serves on the editorial boards of Musical Quarterly and the Kurt Weill Foundation Publication Project and on the advisory board of the Yale University Press Broadway Series. He was the Director of the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop in New York City for two decades beginning in 1982.
  
  wn.com/Maury_Yeston
• Michael Bennett
  Michael Bennett (April 8, 1943 – July 2, 1987) was an American musical theater director, writer, choreographer, and dancer. He won seven Tony Awards for his choreography and direction of Broadway shows and was nominated for an additional eleven.
  Bennett choreographed Promises, Promises, Follies and Company. In 1976, he won the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical and the Tony Award for Best Choreography for the Pulitzer Prize–winning phenomenon A Chorus Line. Bennett, under the aegis of producer Joseph Papp, created A Chorus Line based on a precedent-setting workshop process which he pioneered. He also directed and co-choreographed Dreamgirls with Michael Peters.
  Bennett was born Michael Bennett DiFiglia in Buffalo, New York, the son of Helen (Ternoff), a secretary, and Salvatore Joseph DiFiglia, a factory worker. His father was Roman Catholic and his mother was Jewish. He studied dance and choreography in his teens and staged a number of shows in his local high school before dropping out to accept the role of Baby John in the US and European tours of West Side Story.
  
  wn.com/Michael_Bennett
• Michael Cristofer
  Michael Ivan Cristofer (born January 22, 1945, Trenton, New Jersey) is an American playwright, filmmaker and actor. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play for The Shadow Box in 1977.
  Cristofer was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Drama and a Tony Award for the Broadway production of his play, The Shadow Box. Subsequent to New York, the play was produced in every major American city and worldwide from Europe to the Far East. Other plays include Breaking Up at Primary Stages; Ice at Manhattan Theatre Club; Black Angel at Circle Repertory Company; The Lady and the Clarinet starring Stockard Channing, produced by the Mark Taper Forum, Long Wharf Theater, Off-Broadway and on the London Fringe, and Amazing Grace starring Marsha Mason which received the American Theater Critics Award as the best play produced in the United States during the 1996-97 season.
  Cristofer's film work includes the screenplays for The Shadow Box directed by Paul Newman (Golden Globe Award, Emmy nomination), Falling in Love, with Meryl Streep and Robert De Niro, The Witches of Eastwick with Jack Nicholson, The Bonfire of the Vanities directed by Brian De Palma, Breaking Up starring Russell Crowe and Salma Hayek, and Casanova starring Heath Ledger. His directing credits include Gia, for HBO Pictures starring Angelina Jolie, Mercedes Ruehl and Faye Dunaway which was nominated for five Emmys and for which he won a Director's Guild Award. He next directed Body Shots starring Sean Patrick Flanery, Jerry O'Connell, Amanda Peet and Tara Reid and Original Sin starring Angelina Jolie and Antonio Banderas which was released in 2001. He is currently preparing to direct Fade Out from his own screenplay.
  
  wn.com/Michael_Cristofer
• Michael Gore
  Michael Gore (born March 5, 1951) is an American composer. He, along with lyricist Dean Pitchford, won the Oscar in 1980 for best original song for "Fame" from the film of the same title. He also won the award that year for best original score. Gore is the younger brother of singer/songwriter Lesley Gore.
  Gore wrote the music for the notorious Broadway flop Carrie - The Musical. Two of his songs, with lyrics by Lynn Ahrens, were featured in the 2003 movie Camp.
  He also composed the theme and score for the 1983 hit film Terms of Endearment starring Shirley MacLaine and Debra Winger, notching a hit on the Adult Contemporary chart (and briefly the pop charts) under his own name with the "Theme" from this film.
  
  
  
  wn.com/Michael_Gore
• 
  Michel Legrand
  Michel Jean Legrand (born 24 February 1932, in Bécon-les-Bruyères in the Paris suburbs) is a French musical composer, arranger, conductor, and pianist. His father Raymond Legrand was a conductor and composer renowned for hits such as Irma la douce and his mother, Marcelle Der Mikaëlian (sister of conductor Jacques Hélian), who married Legrand Senior in 1929, was descended from the Armenian bourgeoisie.
  Legrand is a prolific composer, having written over 200 film and television scores in addition to many memorable songs. He is best known for his often haunting film music and scores, such as The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) featuring the song "The Windmills of Your Mind" for which he won his first Academy Award.
  Legrand has composed more than two hundred film and television scores and several musicals and has made well over a hundred albums. He has won three Oscars (out of 13 nominations) and five Grammys and has been nominated for an Emmy. He was twenty-two when his first album, I Love Paris, became one of the best-selling instrumental albums ever released. He is a virtuoso jazz and classical pianist and an accomplished arranger and conductor who performs with orchestras all over the world.
  
  wn.com/Michel_Legrand
• Mike Ockrent
  Mike Ockrent (18 June 1946 - 2 December 1999) was a British stage director, well-known both for his Broadway musicals and smaller niche plays. He was educated at Highgate School. Through directing Educating Rita and Follies, he became an established figure in London theatre. In 1986 he made a successful transition to New York with Me and My Girl that earned several Tony Award nominations. In later life Ockrent worked in film, mainly straight-to-TV movies.
  In 1992 Ockrent worked with Susan Stroman on Crazy for You and other productions. They were married in 1996 and remained so until Ockrent's death from leukemia in New York in 1999.
  A charitable trust now exists in his name. The trust aims to give access to theatre for children with cancer, involving nights at the theatre with visits backstage afterwards. It also funds leukaemia research, "both mainstream and 'alternative'".
  
  wn.com/Mike_Ockrent
• Monty Norman
  Monty Norman (born in London, UK on 4 April 1928) is a singer and film composer best known for composing "The James Bond Theme".
  Norman was born Monty Noserovitch in Stepney in the East End of London, the only child of Jewish parents, Annie (née Berlin) and Abraham Noserovitch, on the second night of Passover in 1928. When Norman's father was young, he travelled from Latvia to England with his mother (Norman's grandmother).
  As a child during World War II, Norman was evacuated from London but later returned during the Blitz. As a young man he did national service in the RAF, where he became interested in pursuing a career in singing.
  In the 1950s and early 1960s, Norman was a singer for big bands such as those of Cyril Stapleton, Stanley Black, Ted Heath, and Nat Temple. He also sang in various variety shows, sharing top billing with other singers and comedy stars such as Benny Hill, Harry Secombe, Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, Harry Worth, Tommy Cooper, Jimmy James, Tony Hancock, Jimmy Edwards, and Max Miller. One of his songs, "False Hearted Lover", was successful internationally.
  
  wn.com/Monty_Norman
• 
  Natalie Cole
  Natalie Maria Cole (born February 6, 1950) is an American singer, songwriter and performer. The daughter of jazz legend Nat King Cole, Cole rode to musical success in the mid-1970s as an R&B artist with the hits "This Will Be (An Everlasting Love)", "Inseparable" and "Our Love". After a period of failing sales and performances due to a heavy drug addiction, Cole reemerged as a pop artist with the 1987 album, Everlasting, and her cover of Bruce Springsteen's "Pink Cadillac". In the 1990s, she re-recorded standards by her father, resulting in her biggest success, Unforgettable... with Love, which sold over seven million copies and also won Cole numerous Grammy Awards.
  Natalie Cole was born in Los Angeles, the daughter of crooner Nat King Cole and former Duke Ellington Orchestra singer Maria Cole. Raised in the affluent Hancock Park district of Los Angeles; regarding her childhood, Cole has referred to her family as "the black Kennedys" and was exposed to many great singers of jazz, soul, and blues. At the age of six Natalie sang on her father's Christmas album and later began performing at age 11.
  
  wn.com/Natalie_Cole
• 
  Neil Simon
  Neil Simon (born July 4, 1927) is an American playwright and screenwriter. He has written numerous Broadway plays, including Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues, and The Odd Couple. He won the 1991 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Lost In Yonkers. He has written the screenplays for several of his plays that were made into movies. He also has written the books for several musicals, including Sweet Charity.
  Neil Simon was born on July 4, 1927 in The Bronx, New York City to Irving Simon, a garment salesman, and his wife Mamie. He was their second son and grew up in Washington Heights, Manhattan during the Great Depression. His father often abandoned the family, causing financial and emotional difficulties. He attended DeWitt Clinton High School and graduated at the age of sixteen.
  He attended New York Universitybriefly from 1944 to 1945, where he was enlisted in the Army Air Force Reserve training program. He was assigned to Lowry Air Force Base during 1945 and attended the University of Denver from 1945 to 1946. He was a sports editor for the military magazine Rev-Meter.
  
  wn.com/Neil_Simon
• Nelson Riddle
  Nelson Smock Riddle, Jr. (June 1, 1921 – October 6, 1985) was an American arranger, composer, bandleader and orchestrator whose career stretched from the late 1940s to the mid 1980s. His work for Capitol Records kept such vocalists as Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Nat King Cole, Judy Garland, Peggy Lee, Johnny Mathis, Rosemary Clooney and Keely Smith household names. He found commercial and critical success again in the 1980s with a trio of Platinum albums with vocalist Linda Ronstadt.
  Riddle was born in Oradell, New Jersey, the only child of Marie Albertine Riddle and Nelson Smock Riddle, Sr., and later moved to nearby Ridgewood. Following his father's interest in music, he began taking piano lessons at age eight and trombone lessons at age fourteen. Riddle and his family had a summer house in Rumson, New Jersey. He enjoyed Rumson so much that he convinced his parents to allow him to attend high school there for his senior year. After his graduation from Rumson High School, Riddle spent his late teens and early 20s playing trombone in and occasionally arranging for various local dance bands, culminating in his association with the Charlie Spivak Orchestra.
  
  wn.com/Nelson_Riddle
• Nicholas Dante
  Nicholas Dante (November 22, 1941 – May 21, 1991) was an American dancer and writer, best-known for having co-written the book of the musical A Chorus Line.
  Born Conrado Morales in New York City to Puerto Rican parents, his early career was spent dancing in the chorus of Broadway musicals such as Applause and Ambassador.
  In 1974, he was approached by friend Michael Bennett who invited him to the sessions which led to the basis of material for the book of a musical about Broadway "gypsies", the dancers who serve as a backdrop for the leading performers. Eventually, collaborating with James Kirkwood, Jr., the result was A Chorus Line, which earned him the 1976 Tony Award and Drama Desk Award for Best Book of a Musical and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. In particular, the story of Paul, the homosexual Puerto Rican dancer whose early career consisted of working in a drag show, was based primarily on Dante. The actor who originated the role on the famous monologue, Sammy Williams, won a Best Featured Actor in a Musical award in 1976 for the role. Dante played the role himself later on.^{[citation needed]}
  
  wn.com/Nicholas_Dante
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  Nino Rota
  Nino Rota (December 3, 1911, Milan – April 10, 1979, Rome) was an Italian composer and academic who is best known for his film scores, notably for the films of Federico Fellini and Luchino Visconti. He also composed the music for two of Franco Zeffirelli's Shakespeare films, and for the first two films of Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather trilogy, receiving for the latter the Academy Award for Best Original Score in 1974.
  During his long career Rota was an extraordinarily prolific composer, especially of music for the cinema. He wrote more than 150 scores for Italian and international productions from the 1930s until his death in 1979—an average of three scores each year over a 46 year period, and in his most productive period from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s he wrote as many as ten scores every year, and sometimes more, with a remarkable thirteen film scores to his credit in 1954. Alongside this great body of film work, he composed ten operas, five ballets and dozens of other orchestral, choral and chamber works, the best known being his string concerto. He also composed the music for many theatre productions by Visconti, Zeffirelli and Eduardo de Filippo as well as maintaining a long teaching career at the Liceo Musicale in Bari, Italy, where he was the director for almost 30 years.
  
  wn.com/Nino_Rota
• Noel Gay
  Noel Gay (15 July 1898 – 4 March 1954) was born Reginald Moxon Armitage. He also used the name Stanley Hill professionally. He was a successful British composer of popular music of the 1930s and 1940s whose output comprised 45 songs as well as the music for 28 films and 26 London shows. Sheridan Morley has commented that he was "the closest Britain ever came to a local Irving Berlin".
  Armitage was born in Wakefield, Yorkshire, England. He was educated at Queen Elizabeth Grammar School before obtaining a scholarship at the age of 15 to attend the Royal College of Music in London, after which he attended university. He had become music director and organist at St. Anne's Church in London's Soho district by the age of eighteen, prior a brief period of military service during the First World War and then studies at Christ's College, Cambridge. A precocious talent, he had deputised for the choirmaster of Wakefield Cathedral from the age of eight, becoming honorary deputy organist at twelve.
  Whilst at Cambridge, Armitage's interest in religious music and composition declined as that in musical comedy grew. He began writing popular songs, using the stage name Noel Gay. According to Morley the name was derived "from a sign he read on a London bus in 1924: 'NOEL Coward and Maisie GAY in a new revue'." His pseudonym of Stanley Hill was used from time to time for his more sentimental work. After contributing to revues such as Stop Press he was commissioned to write the entire score and lyrics for André Charlot's 1926 revue. His next show was Clowns In Clover, which starred Cicely Courtneidge and Jack Hulbert, a husband-and-wife team of the time.
  
  wn.com/Noel_Gay
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  Norah Jones
  Norah Jones (born Geethali Norah Jones Shankar; March 30, 1979) is an American singer-songwriter, pianist, and actress. She is the daughter of Indian sitar player Ravi Shankar. She is also the paternal half-sister of Anoushka Shankar.
  In 2002, she launched her solo music career with the release of the commercially successful and critically acclaimed album Come Away With Me, a fusion of jazz, pop, and country music, which was certified a diamond album in 2002, selling over 20 million copies. The record earned Jones five Grammy Awards, including the Album of the Year, Record of the Year, and Best New Artist. Her subsequent studio albums, Feels Like Home, released in 2004, Not Too Late, released in 2007, the same year she made her film debut in My Blueberry Nights, and her 2009 release The Fall all gained Platinum status after selling over a million copies and were generally well received by critics. Jones' fifth studio album, Little Broken Hearts was released on April 27, 2012.
  Jones has won nine Grammy Awards and was Billboard magazine's 60th-best-selling music artist of the 2000–2009 decade. Throughout her career, Jones has won numerous awards and has sold over 40 million albums worldwide.Billboard named her the top jazz artist of the 2000–2009 decade, establishing herself as one of the best-selling artists of her time.
  
  wn.com/Norah_Jones
• Norman Gimbel
  Norman Gimbel is an American lyricist of popular songs, television and movie themes whose writing career includes such titles as "Sway", "Canadian Sunset", "Summer Samba", "The Girl from Ipanema", "Killing Me Softly With His Song", "Meditation" and "I Will Wait for You", along with an Oscar for "It Goes Like It Goes" - from the film Norma Rae. During 1984 he was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.
  A native of Brooklyn, Norman Gimbel was self-taught in music and following initial employment with music publisher David Blum, progressed to become a contract songwriter with Edwin H. Morris Music. Small successes and moderate fame came as a result of lively novelty songs "Ricochet", which was popularized in a 1953 recording by Teresa Brewer from which was developed the 1954 Judy Canova film Ricochet Romance, and "A Whale of a Tale", sung by Kirk Douglas in another 1954 production, Disney's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Greater success was earned with Dean Martin's recording of "Sway", which reached #6 on the UK Singles Chart, followed by his first big success, Andy Williams' rendition of "Canadian Sunset", which scored to #1 in 1956.
  
  wn.com/Norman_Gimbel
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  Paul Jabara
  Paul Jabara (January 31, 1948 – September 29, 1992) was an American actor, singer, and songwriter of Lebanese ancestry. He wrote Donna Summer's "Last Dance" from Thank God It's Friday (1978) and Barbra Streisand's song "The Main Event/Fight" from The Main Event (1979). He cowrote the Weather Girls hit, "It's Raining Men" with Paul Shaffer. Jabara's cousin and close friend Jad Azkoul is also a Lebanese-American musician specialising in classical guitar.
  Jabara was in the original cast of the stage musicals Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar. He took over the role of Frank-N-Furter in the Los Angeles Production of The Rocky Horror Show when Tim Curry left the production to film the movie version in England. He appeared in John Schlesinger's 1975 film, "The Day of the Locust", where he sang the production number "Hot Voo-Doo". In Thank God It's Friday he played the role of Carl, the lovelorn and nearsighted disco goer, and he also contributed as a singer on two tracks on the original soundtrack album.
  
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  Paul Simon
  Paul Frederic Simon (born October 13, 1941) is a grammy award winning American singer-songwriter, poet and guitarist.
  Simon's international fame and success began as part of the duo Simon & Garfunkel, launched in 1964 with musical partner Art Garfunkel. Simon wrote most of the pair's songs, including three that reached No. 1 on the U.S. singles charts: "The Sound of Silence", "Mrs. Robinson", and "Bridge Over Troubled Water". The duo split up in 1970 at the height of their popularity, and Simon began a successful solo career, recording three highly acclaimed albums over the next five years. In 1986, he released Graceland, an album inspired by South African township music. Simon also wrote and starred in the film One-Trick Pony in 1980 and co-wrote the Broadway musical The Capeman in 1998.
  Simon has earned 12 Grammys for his solo and collaborative work, including the Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2001, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and in 2006 was selected as one of the "100 People Who Shaped the World" by Time magazine. Among many other honors, Simon was the first recipient of the Library of Congress' Gershwin Prize for Popular Song in 2007. In 1986 Simon was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Music degree from Berklee College of Music where he currently serves on the Board of Trustees.
  
  wn.com/Paul_Simon
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  Paula Cole
  Paula Cole (born April 5, 1968) is an American singer-songwriter. Her single "Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?" reached the top ten of the Billboard Hot 100 in 1997, and the following year she won a Grammy Award for Best New Artist.
  Cole was raised in Rockport, Massachusetts; her mother was an elementary school art teacher, and her father was a professor of biology and ecology at Salem State College and a polka musician. She attended Rockport High School, where she was president of her senior class and performed in school theatrical productions such as South Pacific. Cole then attended the Berklee College of Music in Boston, where she studied jazz singing and improvisation. She was offered a record deal by a jazz label, but decided to turn it down.
  Cole got her first big professional break when she was invited to perform on Peter Gabriel's 1993-1994 Secret World Live tour. Shortly after this, she was signed on with her first record company Imago Records. Through this record company, she released her first album Harbinger in 1994. Within that year of Harbinger's release, Imago Records went out of business. In 1995, she was signed on to Warner Bros. Records. The record company reissued Harbinger in the Autumn of 1995.
  
  wn.com/Paula_Cole
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  Paula Vogel
  Paula Vogel (born 16 November 1951) is an American playwright and university professor. She received the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play, How I Learned to Drive.
  Vogel was born in Washington, D.C. to Donald Stephen Vogel, an advertising executive, and Phyllis Rita Bremerman, a secretary for United States Postal Service Training and Development Center. She is a graduate of The Catholic University of America (1974, B.A.) and Cornell University (1976, M.A.). Vogel also attended Bryn Mawr College from 1969 to 1970 and 1971 to 1972.
  A productive playwright since the late 1970s, Vogel first came to national prominence with her AIDS-related seriocomedy The Baltimore Waltz, which won the Obie award for Best Play in 1992. She is best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning play How I Learned to Drive (1997), which examines the impact and echoes of child sexual abuse and incest. Other notable plays include Desdemona, A Play About A Handkerchief (1979); The Oldest Profession (1981); And Baby Makes Seven (1984); Hot 'N Throbbing (1994); and The Mineola Twins (1996).
  
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  Pete Townshend
  Peter Dennis Blandford "Pete" Townshend (born 19 May 1945) is an English rock guitarist, vocalist, songwriter and author, known principally as the guitarist and songwriter for the rock group The Who, as well as for his own solo career. His career with The Who spans more than 40 years, during which time the band grew to be considered one of the most influential bands of the 1960s and 1970s, and, according to Eddie Vedder, "possibly the greatest live band ever."
  Townshend is the primary songwriter for The Who, having written well over 100 songs for the band's 11 studio albums, including concept albums and the rock operas Tommy and Quadrophenia, plus popular rock and roll radio staples like Who's Next, and dozens more that appeared as non-album singles, bonus tracks on reissues, and tracks on rarities compilations like Odds & Sods. He has also written over 100 songs that have appeared on his solo albums, as well as radio jingles and television theme songs. Although known primarily as a guitarist, he also plays other instruments such as keyboards, banjo, accordion, synthesiser, bass guitar and drums, on his own solo albums, several Who albums, and as a guest contributor to a wide array of other artists' recordings. Townshend has never had formal lessons in any of the instruments he plays.
  
  wn.com/Pete_Townshend
• Peter Nero
  Peter Nero (born Bernard Nierow, May 22, 1934) is an American pianist and pops conductor.
  Born in Brooklyn, New York, As Bernard Nierow, Nero started his formal music training at the age of seven. He studied piano under Frederick Bried. By the time he was fourteen, he was accepted to New York City's High School of Music and Art and won a scholarship to the Juilliard School of Music. Constance Keene, his teacher and mentor, once wrote in an issue of Keyboard Classics, "Vladimir Horowitz was Peter's greatest fan!" He graduated from Brooklyn College in 1956.
  Nero recorded his first album in 1961, and won a Grammy Award that year for "Best New Artist." Since then, he has received another Grammy, garnered ten additional nominations and released 67 albums. Nero's early association with RCA Records produced 23 albums in eight years. His subsequent move to Columbia Records resulted in a million-selling single and album - Summer of '42.
  His first major national TV success came at the age of seventeen when he was chosen to perform Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue on Paul Whiteman's TV Special. He subsequently appeared on many top variety and talk shows including 11 guest appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, and numerous appearances on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.
  
  wn.com/Peter_Nero
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  Ralph Burns
  Ralph Burns (June 29, 1922 – November 21, 2001) was an American songwriter, bandleader, composer, conductor, arranger and bebop pianist.
  Burns was born in Newton, Massachusetts where he began playing the piano as a child. In 1938, he attended the New England Conservatory of Music. He admitted that he learned the most about jazz by transcribing the works of Count Basie, Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington. While a student, Burns lived in Frances Wayne’s home. Wayne was already a well-known big band singer and her brother Nick Jerret was a bandleader who began working with Burns. He found himself in the company of such famous performers as Nat King Cole and Art Tatum.
  After Burns moved to New York in the early 1940s, he met Charlie Barnet and the two began working together. In 1944, he joined the Woody Herman band with members Neal Hefti, Bill Harris, Flip Phillips, Chubby Jackson and Dave Tough. Together, the group developed a powerful and distinctive sound. For 15 years, Burns wrote or arranged many of the band's major hits including "Bijou", "Northwest Passage" and "Apple Honey", and on the longer work "Lady McGowan’s Dream" and the three-part Summer Sequence.
  
  wn.com/Ralph_Burns
• Ray Heindorf
  Ray Heindorf (August 25, 1908 - February 3, 1980) was an American songwriter, composer, conductor, and arranger.
  Born in Haverstraw, New York, Heindorf worked as a pianist in a movie house in Mechanicville in his early teens. In 1928, he moved to New York City, where he worked as a musical arranger before heading to Hollywood. He gained his first job as an orchestrator at MGM, where he worked on Hollywood Revue of 1929, and subsequently went on the road playing piano for Lupe Vélez.
  After completing this engagement, he joined Warner Bros., composing and/or arranging and conducting music exclusively for the studio for nearly forty years. Heindorf, along with Georgie Stoll at MGM, were jazz aficionados well known in the black entertainment community for employing minority musicians in their studio music departments.
  He undertook the musical direction of Judy Garland's 1954 comeback film A Star is Born and made a cameo appearance as himself in the premiere party sequence where Jack Carson's character congratulates him on a great score.
  
  wn.com/Ray_Heindorf
• Raymond Rasch
  Ray Rasch (March 1, 1917 in Toledo, Ohio – December 23, 1964) was a pianist and arranger on the Hollywood scene in 1950s and 1960s. Rasch won a posthumous Academy Award in 1972 for "Best Original Music Score" for Chaplin's 1952 film Limelight (along with Charles Chaplin and Larry Russell).
  
  wn.com/Raymond_Rasch
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  Richard Rodgers
  Richard Charles Rodgers (June 28, 1902 – December 31, 1979) was an American composer of music for more than 900 songs and for 43 Broadway musicals. He also composed music for films and television. He is best known for his songwriting partnerships with the lyricists Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein II. His compositions have had a significant impact on popular music down to the present day, and have an enduring broad appeal.
  Rodgers was the first person to win what are considered the top show business awards in television, recording, movies and Broadway—an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony—now known collectively as an EGOT. He has also won a Pulitzer Prize, making him one of two people (Marvin Hamlisch is the other) to receive each award.
  Born into a prosperous ethnic German Jewish family in Arverne, Queens, New York City, Rodgers was the son of Mamie Levy and Dr. William Abrahams Rodgers, a prominent physician who had changed the family name from Abrahams. Richard began playing the piano at age six. He attended P.S. 10, Townsend Harris Hall and DeWitt Clinton High School. Rodgers spent his early teenage summers in Camp Wigwam (Waterford, Maine) where he composed some of his first songs.
  
  wn.com/Richard_Rodgers
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  Rickie Lee Jones
  Rickie Lee Jones (born November 8, 1954) is an American vocalist, musician, songwriter, and producer. Over the course of a five-decade career, Jones has recorded in various musical styles including rock, R&B, blues, pop, soul, and jazz standards. Her songwriting has been characterized as "a blend of bravado and vulnerability [that] wavers on indefinable borders." She is also known for her unique singing style, especially in live performances. One concert reviewer, describing her rendering of "We Belong Together," states she "reached her apex, skating from swells into near screams into breathy whispers, from pontillist stacatto scats into brassy, trumpetlike bursts."
  In 1999, Jones was listed at #30 in the VH1 list of 100 greatest women of rock.
  Rickie Lee Jones was born on the north side of Chicago to Bettye and Richard Jones. Her paternal grandfather, Frank 'Peg Leg' Jones, and her grandmother, Myrtle Lee, a dancer, were Vaudevillians based in Chicago, Illinois. A singer/dancer/comedian, Peg Leg Jones' routine consisted of playing the ukelele, singing ballads, and telling stories. One of four children, her father was a WW2 veteran. A singer, song writer, painter, and trumpet player, Mr. Jones worked as a waiter. Her mother, Bettye, was raised in orphanages in Ohio with her three brothers until she was old enough to leave. Bettye and Richard met in a drug store coffee shop. Rickie Lee was born the third child of four, in Chicago, 1954.
  
  wn.com/Rickie_Lee_Jones
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  Robert Goulet
  Robert Gerard Goulet (November 26, 1933 – October 30, 2007) was a Canadian American entertainer as a singer and actor. He is probably best known for originating the role of Lancelot in the 1960 Broadway musical Camelot and his numerous appearances in Las Vegas.
  Goulet was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, the only son of French Canadian parents Jeanette Gauthier and Joseph Georges André Goulet, a laborer. Through his father he was a descendant of Zacharie Cloutier as well as Jacques Goulet. Shortly after his father's death, 13-year-old Robert moved with his mother and sister Claire to Girouxville, Alberta, and he spent his formative years in Canada.
  Due to the Canadian citizenship law at the time, Goulet was not awarded Canadian citizenship despite his Canadian parents, making him a Lost Canadian. A 2008 law allowed him to retroactively be rewarded citizenship, but he died before it was received.
  Goulet's rise to fame started at the age of five when his aunts and uncles blackened his face with burnt cork and prompted him to do Al Jolson impressions. Though his performance was well-received by his relatives, the experience was deeply traumatic for the young Goulet, and left him with performance anxiety which plagued him for many years. Despite this stage fright, Goulet was encouraged by his parents to continue performing.
  
  wn.com/Robert_Goulet
• Robert Schenkkan
  Robert Frederic Schenkkan, Jr. (born 19 March 1953) is an American playwright, screenwriter, and actor, perhaps most recognizable as the character of Lieutenant Commander Dexter Remmick in Star Trek: The Next Generation. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1992 for his work The Kentucky Cycle.
  Schenkkan was born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, to Jean McKenzie and Robert Frederic Schenkkan, a public television executive. He grew up in Austin, Texas. As a Plan II Honors student he received a B.A.in Drama, magna cum laude from the University of Texas, Austin (Phi Beta Kappa and Friars' Society), and an M.F.A. in Theatre Arts from Cornell University. For many years, he lived in New York City and then Los Angeles, California, working both as a writer and an actor in film, television, and theatre. Since 1990 he has focused exclusively on his writing.
  Schenkkan is the author of ten full-length plays. By the Waters of Babylon premiered at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in February, 2005. The play is unrelated to the Stephen Vincent Benét short story By the Waters of Babylon or its subsequent adaptation. Lewis and Clark Reach the Euphrates premiered at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles in December 2005. The Marriage of Miss Hollywood and King Neptune premiered at the University of Texas at Austin in November 2005. And The Devil and Daniel Webster premiered at the Seattle Children’s Theatre in February 2006.
  
  wn.com/Robert_Schenkkan
• Roger Miller
  Roger Dean Miller (January 2, 1936 – October 25, 1992) was an American singer, songwriter, musician and actor, best known for his honky tonk-influenced novelty songs. His most recognized tunes included the chart-topping country/pop hits "King of the Road", "Dang Me" and "England Swings", all from the mid-1960s Nashville sound era.
  After growing up in Oklahoma and serving in the United States Army, Miller began his musical career as a songwriter in the late 1950s, penning such hits as "Billy Bayou" and "Home" for Jim Reeves and "Invitation to the Blues" for Ray Price. He later started a recording career and reached the peak of his fame in the late-1960s, but continued to record and tour into the 1990s, charting his final top 20 country hit "Old Friends" with Willie Nelson in 1982. Later in his life, he wrote the music and lyrics for the 1985 Tony-award winning Broadway musical Big River, in which he also acted.
  Miller died from lung cancer in 1992, and was posthumously inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame three years later. His songs continued to be recorded by younger artists, with covers of "Tall, Tall Trees" by Alan Jackson and "Husbands and Wives" by Brooks & Dunn, each reaching the number one spot on country charts in the 1990s. The Roger Miller Museum in his home town serves as a tribute to Miller.
  
  wn.com/Roger_Miller
• Rupert Holmes
  Rupert Holmes (born February 24, 1947) is an English-born American composer, singer-songwriter, musician and author of plays, novels and stories. He is best known for his number one pop hit "Escape (The Piña Colada Song)" (1979/1980) and the song "Him", which reached the number 6 position on the Hot 100 U.S. pop chart in 1980. He is also known for his 1985 Tony Award-winning musical Drood (originally The Mystery of Edwin Drood) and his 2007 Drama Desk Award-winning book for the Broadway musical Curtains, and for his television series Remember WENN.
  Holmes was born David Goldstein in Northwich, Cheshire, England. His father, Leonard Goldstein, was a United States Army Warrant Officer and bandleader, his mother, Gwen, was English, and both were musical. Holmes has dual American and British citizenship. The family moved when Holmes was six years old to the northern New York City suburb of Nanuet, New York, where Holmes grew up and attended nearby Nyack High School and then the Manhattan School of Music (majoring in clarinet). Holmes' brother, Richard, is an opera singer based in New York City and is the principal lyric baritone of the New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players, sings roles with regional opera companies, such as Glimmerglass Opera, Lake George, and Virginia Opera, among others, and has appeared at the Metropolitan Opera.
  
  wn.com/Rupert_Holmes
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  Sam Shepard
  Sam Shepard (born Samuel Shepard Rogers IV; November 5, 1943) is an American playwright, actor, and television and film director. He is the author of several books of short stories, essays, and memoirs, and received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1979 for his play Buried Child. Shepard was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of pilot Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff (1983).
  Born Samuel Shepard Rogers IV in Fort Sheridan, Illinois, he worked on a ranch as a teenager. His father, Samuel Shepard Rogers, Jr., was a teacher and farmer who served in the United States Army Air Forces as a bomber pilot during World War II. His mother, Jane Elaine (née Schook), was a teacher and a native of Chicago, Illinois. After high school, Shepard briefly attended college, but dropped out to join a travelling theater group. He was also a drummer for the eccentric late-1960s rock band The Holy Modal Rounders, featured in the movie Easy Rider (1969).
  
  wn.com/Sam_Shepard
• Sam Spiegel
  Sam Spiegel (November 11, 1901 – December 31, 1985) was an Austrian-born American independent film producer.
  Spiegel was born in Jarosław, Galicia, Austria-Hungary (now in Poland) as Samuel P. Spiegel to a German-Jewish father and Polish mother^{[citation needed]} and educated at the University of Vienna. His brother was Shalom Spiegel, a professor of medieval Hebrew poetry. Spiegel worked briefly in Hollywood in 1927 following a stint serving with Hashomer Hatzair in Palestine. He then went to Berlin to produce German and French adaptations of Universal films until 1933 when he fled Germany. As an independent producer, Spiegel was behind a number of European films. In 1938, he immigrated to Mexico and subsequently the United States. Between 1935 and 1954, Spiegel billed himself as S.P. Eagle. After that he used his real name. "...Spiegel a decidedly flawed protagonist, as well as the wit, sophistication, and Old World charm that make him a titanic figure the likes of which the movie industry will not see again."
  
  wn.com/Sam_Spiegel
• Saul Chaplin
  Saul Chaplin (February 19, 1912 – November 15, 1997) was an American composer and musical director.
  He was born Saul Kaplan in Brooklyn, New York. He had worked on stage, screen and television since the days of Tin Pan Alley. In film, he won four Oscars for collaborating on the scores and orchestrations of An American in Paris (1951), Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954) and West Side Story (1961).
  Following education at New York University's School of Commerce, Chaplin joined the ASCAP and started out penning tunes for the theatre, vaudeville and for New York's famous songwriting district, Tin Pan Alley. While in New York, Chaplin teamed with Sammy Cahn to compose original songs for Vitaphone movie shorts, filmed in Brooklyn by Warner Brothers. During this period the team was sometimes billed only by surname ("Cahn and Chaplin"), in the manner of Rodgers and Hart or Gilbert and Sullivan.
  Cahn and Chaplin relocated to Hollywood and scored two films for Universal Pictures. Chaplin then moved to Columbia Pictures to score Cover Girl and The Jolson Story. While on the latter film, Chaplin and Al Jolson penned the million-selling hit tune The Anniversary Song. In the late 1940s, Chaplin moved to MGM to work on a long string of films including On the Town (1949), Kiss Me Kate (1953), High Society (1956) and Merry Andrew (1958). For collaborating on such hits as Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen and Please Be Kind, Chaplin was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1985.
  
  wn.com/Saul_Chaplin
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  Scott Joplin
  Scott Joplin (ca. 1867/1868? – April 1, 1917) was an American composer and pianist. Joplin achieved fame for his ragtime compositions, and was later dubbed "The King of Ragtime". During his brief career, Joplin wrote 44 original ragtime pieces, one ragtime ballet, and two operas. One of his first pieces, the Maple Leaf Rag, became ragtime's first and most influential hit, and has been recognized as the archetypal rag.
  Joplin was born into a musical African American family of laborers in Northeast Texas, and developed his musical knowledge with the help of local teachers, most notably Julius Weiss. Joplin grew up in Texarkana, where he formed a vocal quartet, and taught mandolin and guitar. During the late 1880s he left his job as a laborer with the railroad, and travelled around the American South as an itinerant musician. He went to Chicago for the World's Fair of 1893, which played a major part in making ragtime a national craze by 1897.
  Joplin moved to Sedalia, Missouri in 1894, and earned a living teaching piano and going on tour across the Southern US. In Sedalia, he taught future ragtime composers Arthur Marshall, Scott Hayden and Brun Campbell. Joplin began publishing music in 1895, and publication of his Maple Leaf Rag in 1899 brought him fame and had a profound influence on subsequent writers of ragtime. It also brought the composer a steady income for life. During his lifetime, Joplin did not reach this level of success again and frequently had financial problems.
  
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  Sheena Easton
  Sheena Easton (born Sheena Shirley Orr; 27 April 1959) is a Scottish recording artist. Easton became famous for being the focus of an episode in the British television programme The Big Time, which recorded her attempts to gain a record contract and her eventual signing with EMI Records. Easton is a two-time Grammy winner and has 15 US Top 40 singles on the Billboard US Pop Singles chart to date. She is the only artist in the history of the Billboard chart to have a Top Five single on all the key charts: Pop/Rock, R&B, Country, Dance, and Adult Contemporary.
  Easton rose to fame in the early 1980s with the pop hits "9 to 5" (known as "Morning Train" in the United States), "For Your Eyes Only," "Strut," "Sugar Walls," "U Got the Look" with Prince, and "The Lover in Me." She went on to become successful in the United States and Japan, working with prominent vocalists and producers, such as Prince, Christopher Neil, Kenny Rogers, Luis Miguel, L.A. Reid and Babyface, and Nile Rodgers.
  Easton was born Sheena Shirley Orr in the Scottish town of Bellshill, the youngest of six children to steel mill labourer Alex Orr and his wife Annie. She had two brothers (Robert and Alex) and three sisters (Marilyn, Annessa and Morag). Her earliest known public performance as a singer was at the age of five (in 1964), when she sang "Early One Morning" for her uncle and aunt and various relatives at the couple's 25th wedding anniversary celebration.^{[citation needed]}
  
  wn.com/Sheena_Easton
• Shelby Lynne
  Shelby Lynne (born Shelby Lynn Moorer, October 22, 1968, Quantico, Virginia) is an American singer and songwriter. The success of the 1999 album I Am Shelby Lynne led to her winning the Grammy Award for Best New Artist, even though she had been active in the music industry for some time. She released a Dusty Springfield tribute album called Just a Little Lovin' in 2008. Since then she has started her own independent record label, called Everso Records, and released three albums: Tears, Lies and Alibis, Merry Christmas, and Revelation Road.
  Shelby Lynne was born in Virginia but grew up in Mobile, Alabama,where she attended Theodore High School. Music was an important part of the Moorer family. Her father, who worked as an English teacher and a juvenile corrections officer, played the guitar, while her mother was a singer. Her father also drank a lot and eventually became abusive. In August 1986, when Lynne was 17, her father shot and killed her mother and then himself. She and her younger sister Allison Moorer subsequently moved in with relatives.
  
  wn.com/Shelby_Lynne
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  Sheryl Crow
  Sheryl Suzanne Crow (born February 11, 1962) is an American singer-songwriter, record producer, musician, and actress. Her music incorporates elements of rock, folk, hip hop, country and pop. She has won nine Grammy Awards from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences.
  She has performed with The Rolling Stones and has sung duets with Mick Jagger,Michael Jackson, Eric Clapton, Luciano Pavarotti, John Mellencamp, Kid Rock, Michelle Branch, and Sting among others. She has performed backing vocals for Tina Turner, Michael Jackson, Don Henley and Belinda Carlisle. She also sang as part of the back up vocals for the Bob Dylan 30th Anniversary celebrating Dylan's 30 years as a recording artist. Crow has released seven studio albums, two compilations, and a live album, and has contributed to film soundtracks. She has sold 16 million albums in the United States and 35 million albums worldwide and her newest album, 100 Miles from Memphis, was released on July 20, 2010. Recently she appeared on NBC's 30 Rock, ABC's GCB and Cougar Town, Disney Channel's Hannah Montana Forever, and Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.
  
  wn.com/Sheryl_Crow
• Sid Ramin
  Sidney Norton Ramin (born January 22, 1919) is an American orchestrator, arranger, and composer.
  The son of Ezra Ramin, a window trimmer, and Beatrice D. (Salamoff) Ramin, he was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 22, with various sources indicating either a birth year of 1919 or 1924. Ramin married Gloria Breit, a singer and model, on January 9, 1949. They have one child, a son Ronald.
  Ramin has won several professional awards throughout his career. He is one of only a handful of artists who have won the Academy, Emmy, and Grammy Awards.
  Ramin has orchestrated many television, film, and theatrical productions, as indicated below. He was also responsible for composing the music and lyrics for "Smile, You're On Candid Camera" of the hidden camera television program Candid Camera in the 1960s. In his early years, he frequently collaborated with arranger Robert Ginzler, most notably on Gypsy.
  
  wn.com/Sid_Ramin
• Stephen Flaherty
  Stephen Flaherty (born September 18, 1960) is an American composer of musical theatre. He works most often in collaboration with the lyricist/bookwriter Lynn Ahrens. They are best known for writing the Broadway musicals Once on This Island, which was nominated for eight Tony Awards, Seussical , which was nominated for the Grammy Award and Ragtime, which was nominated for twelve Tony Awards and won Best Original Score. Flaherty was also nominated for two Academy Awards and two Golden Globe Awards with Lynn Ahrens for his songs and song score for the animated film musical Anastasia.
  Flaherty was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He began studying piano at the age of seven. When he was twelve he knew he wanted to write musicals and by age fourteen he had already composed his first musical score. He attended South Hills Catholic High School in Pittsburgh and later studied musical composition and piano at University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, graduating in 1982. He did additional graduate studies in Musical Theater at New York University.
  
  wn.com/Stephen_Flaherty
• 
  Stephen Fry
  Stephen John Fry (born 24 August 1957) is an English actor, screenwriter, author, playwright, journalist, poet, comedian, television presenter, film director, and a director of Norwich City Football Club.
  After a troubled childhood and adolescence, during which he was expelled from a number of schools and eventually spent three months in prison for credit card fraud, he was able to secure a place at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he studied English Literature.
  He first came to public attention in the 1981 Cambridge Footlights Revue presentation "The Cellar Tapes", which also included Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson and Tony Slattery. With Hugh Laurie, as the comedy double act Fry and Laurie, he co-wrote and co-starred in A Bit of Fry & Laurie, and took the role of Jeeves (with Laurie playing Wooster) in Jeeves and Wooster.
  As an actor, Fry played the lead in the film Wilde, was Melchett in the BBC television series Blackadder, starred as the title character Peter Kingdom in the ITV series Kingdom, has a recurring guest role as Dr. Gordon Wyatt on the Fox crime series Bones and appeared as rogue TV host Gordon Deitrich in the dystopian thriller V For Vendetta. He has also written and presented several documentary series including the 2008 television series Stephen Fry in America, which saw him travelling across all 50 US states. Since 2003 he has been the host of the quiz show QI.
  
  wn.com/Stephen_Fry
• Stephen Sondheim
  Stephen Joshua Sondheim ( /ˈsɒnd.haɪm/) (born March 22, 1930) is an American composer and lyricist known for his contributions to musical theatre. He is the winner of an Academy Award, eight Tony Awards (more than any other composer) including the Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre, multiple Grammy Awards, a Pulitzer Prize and the Laurence Olivier Award. Described by Frank Rich of the New York Times as "the greatest, and perhaps best-known artist working in musical theatre", his most famous works include (as composer/lyricist) A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park with George and Into the Woods. He also wrote the lyrics for West Side Story and Gypsy.
  Sondheim has also written material for movies, including the 1981 Warren Beatty film Reds, contributing the song "Goodbye For Now". He also wrote five songs for the 1990 movie Dick Tracy, including "Sooner or Later (I Always Get My Man)", which won the Academy Award for Best Song.
  
  wn.com/Stephen_Sondheim
• 
  Steven Soderbergh
  Steven Andrew Soderbergh (/ˈsoʊdərbɜrɡ/; born January 14, 1963) is an American film producer, screenwriter, cinematographer, editor, and an Academy Award-winning film director. He is best known for directing critically acclaimed commercial Hollywood films like Out of Sight, Erin Brockovich and Traffic, and the remake of Ocean's Eleven. He has also directed smaller, less conventional works, such as Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Schizopolis, Bubble, The Girlfriend Experience and Che. His most recent works are Contagion and Haywire.
  Soderbergh was born in Atlanta, the son of Mary Ann (née Bernard) and Peter Andrew Soderbergh, who was a university administrator and educator. His paternal grandfather was a Swedish immigrant, from Stockholm. When he was a child, his family moved from Atlanta to Charlottesville, Virginia, where he lived during his adolescence, then moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where his father became Dean of Education at Louisiana State University (LSU). There he discovered filmmaking as a teenager, directing short Super 8 mm films with equipment borrowed from LSU students.
  
  wn.com/Steven_Soderbergh
• 
  The Carpenters
  The Carpenters were an American vocal and instrumental duo, consisting of siblings Karen and Richard Carpenter. Though often referred to by the public as The Carpenters, the duo's official name on authorized recordings and press materials is simply "Carpenters". During a period in the 1970s when louder and wilder rock was in great demand, Richard and Karen produced a distinctively soft musical style that made them among the best-selling music artists of all time.
  Carpenters' melodic pop produced a record-breaking run of hit recordings on the American Top 40 and Adult Contemporary charts, and they became leading sellers in the soft rock, easy listening and adult contemporary genres. Carpenters had three #1 singles on the Billboard Hot 100 and fifteen #1 hits on the Adult Contemporary chart (see The Carpenters discography). In addition, they had twelve top 10 singles (including their #1 hits). To date, Carpenters' album and single sales total more than 100 million units.^{[citation needed]}
  During their 14-year career, the Carpenters recorded 11 albums, thirty-one singles, five television specials, and a short-lived television series. They toured in the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Australia, the Netherlands and Belgium. Their recording career ended with Karen's death in 1983 from cardiac arrest following complications of anorexia nervosa. Extensive news coverage of the circumstances surrounding her death increased public awareness of the consequences of eating disorders.
  
  wn.com/The_Carpenters
• Tim Rice
  Sir Timothy Miles Bindon "Tim" Rice (born 10 November 1944) is a British lyricist and author. An Academy Award, Golden Globe Award, Tony Award and Grammy Award-winning lyricist, Rice is best known for his collaborations with Andrew Lloyd Webber, with whom he wrote Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, and additional songs for the 2011 West End revival of The Wizard of Oz, and for his work for Walt Disney Studios with Alan Menken (Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, King David), Elton John (The Lion King, Aida) and Ennio Morricone.
  Rice was born at Shardeloes, an historic English country house near Amersham, Buckinghamshire, United Kingdom that was requisitioned as a maternity hospital during World War II. His father, Hugh Gordon Rice, served with the Eighth Army and reached the rank of major during World War II, whilst his mother, Joan Odette (née Bawden), served in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) as a photographic interpreter. After the war, they worked for the de Havilland aircraft company.
  
  wn.com/Tim_Rice
• 
  Toni Braxton
  Toni Michelle Braxton (born October 7, 1967) is an American R&B singer-songwriter, record producer, and actress. Braxton has won six Grammy Awards, seven American Music Awards, and five Billboard Music Awards and has sold over 60 million records worldwide. She has a contralto vocal type.^{[citation needed]}
  Braxton topped the Billboard 200 with her 1993 self-titled debut album and continued that streak with her second studio album Secrets, which spawned the number-one hits "You're Makin' Me High" and "Un-Break My Heart". Although she had successful albums and singles, Braxton shortly filed for bankruptcy, but then returned with her chart-topping third album, The Heat. In 2009, she returned to the spotlight with "Yesterday", a #12 R&B hit which serves as the first single off her new album Pulse, released on May 4, 2010, which debuted at #1 on Billboard R&B Album Chart. Braxton was involved in the 7th season of the reality show Dancing with the Stars. Her professional partner was Alec Mazo. She was voted off in week five of the competition. It was announced on October 6, 2010 that Braxton once again had filed for bankruptcy. A reality series entitled Braxton Family Values, starring Toni and her sisters, debuted April 12, 2011 on WE tv. WE tv ordered a 13-episode second season of the show after the third episode of the first season. On September 18, 2011, Braxton was inducted into the Georgia Music Hall of Fame.
  
  wn.com/Toni_Braxton
• 
  Tony Kushner
  Anthony Robert "Tony" Kushner (born July 16, 1956) is an American playwright and screenwriter. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1993 for his play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes and co-authored with Eric Roth the screenplay for the 2005 film Munich.
  Kushner was born in Manhattan, New York to Jewish clarinetist and conductor William Kushner and bassoonist Sylvia Deutscher. Shortly after his birth, the family moved to Lake Charles, Louisiana, the seat of Calcasieu Parish where he spent his childhood. During high school Kushner had a reputation in policy debate, at one point going to a camp, and making it to the final rounds. Kushner moved to New York in 1974 to begin his undergraduate college education at Columbia University, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Medieval Studies in 1978. He attended New York University's Graduate Acting Program at the Tisch School of the Arts, graduating in 1984. During graduate school, he spent the summers of 1978-1981 directing both early original works (Masque of Owls and Incidents and Occurrences During the Travels of the Tailor Max) and plays by Shakespeare (A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest) for the children attending the Governor's Program for Gifted Children (GPGC) in Lake Charles.
  
  wn.com/Tony_Kushner
• 
  Tracy Chapman
  Tracy Chapman (born March 30, 1964) is an American singer-songwriter, best known for her singles "Fast Car", "Talkin' 'bout a Revolution", "Baby Can I Hold You", "Crossroads", "Give Me One Reason" and "Telling Stories". She is a multi-platinum and four-time Grammy Award-winning artist.
  Tracy Chapman was born in Cleveland, Ohio. She was raised by her mother, who recognized Tracy's love of music and, despite not having much money, bought her a ukulele when she was just three. Chapman began playing guitar and writing songs at the age of eight. She says that she may have been first inspired to play the guitar by the television show Hee Haw.
  Chapman was raised Baptist and went to an Episcopal high school. She was accepted into the program "A Better Chance", which helps minority students attend private schools. She graduated from Wooster School in Connecticut, then attended Tufts University. She graduated with a B.A. degree in anthropology and African studies.
  In the mid-1990s, Chapman dated author Alice Walker. Chapman maintains a strong separation between her personal and professional lives. “I have a public life that’s my work life and I have my personal life,” she said. “In some ways, the decision to keep the two things separate relates to the work I do."
  
  wn.com/Tracy_Chapman
• Walter Scharf
  Walter Scharf (August 1, 1910 - February 24, 2003) was an American film composer.
  Born in New York, he was the son of Yiddish theatre comic Bessie Zwerling. While in his 20s, he was one of the orchestrators for George Gershwin's Broadway musical Girl Crazy, became singer Helen Morgan's accompanist, and later worked as pianist and arranger for singer Rudy Vallee.
  He began working in Hollywood in 1933, arranging for Al Jolson at Warner Bros., Alice Faye at 20th Century-Fox and Bing Crosby at Paramount. He orchestrated the original version of Irving Berlin's White Christmas for the film Holiday Inn (1942), and from 1942 to 1946 he served as head of music for Republic Pictures.
  From 1948 to 1954, Scharf was arranger-conductor for the Phil Harris-Alice Faye radio show.
  A ten-time Oscar nominee, Scharf worked on more than 100 films, receiving nominations for his musical direction on such pictures as Danny Kaye's Hans Christian Andersen (1952), Barbra Streisand's Funny Girl (1968) and Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971).
  
  wn.com/Walter_Scharf
• Wendy Wasserstein
  Wendy Wasserstein (October 18, 1950 – January 30, 2006) was an American playwright and an Andrew Dickson White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. She received the Tony Award for Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1989 for her play The Heidi Chronicles.
  Wasserstein was born in the Brooklyn section of New York City to Morris Wasserstein, a wealthy textile executive, and his wife, Lola (née Liska) Schleifer, an amateur dancer who moved to the United States from Poland when her father was accused of being a spy. Lola Wasserstein reportedly inspired some of her daughter's characters. Wendy was one of five siblings, including brother Bruce Wasserstein, a well-known investment banker. Her maternal grandfather was Simon Schleifer, a yeshiva teacher in Wloclawek, Poland, who moved to Paterson, New Jersey and became a Hebrew school principal. Claims that Schleifer was a playwright are probably apocryphal, as contemporaries didn't recall this and the assertion only appeared once Wasserstein had won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
  
  wn.com/Wendy_Wasserstein
• Wikipedia Persondata
  wn.com/Wikipedia_Persondata
• William Finn
  William Alan Finn (b. February 28, 1952, Boston, Massachusetts) is an American composer and lyricist of musicals. His musical Falsettos received the 1992 Tony Awards for Best Music and Lyrics and for Best Book.
  Finn, who is Jewish, grew up in Natick, Massachusetts with his parents and siblings, Michael and Nancy. He majored in music at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. When he graduated, he received the Hutchinson Fellowship (a musical composition award). He is also Adjunct Faculty Composer/Lyricist at New York University.
  In 1992, Finn suffered deteriorating vision, dizziness and partial paralysis and was rushed to the hospital. He had arteriovenous malformation, or AVM, in his brain stem. In September, 1992, he had Gamma Knife surgery, which obliterated the AVM. After the surgery, Finn experienced a year of humbled serenity and constantly felt like he had a "new brain." Finn's 2002 musical A New Brain is based on his experience with AVM and his subsequent successful surgery. He lives with his life partner in New York City and Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where he is a composer and writer. Besides composing for the stage and screen, Finn is member of the NYU Tisch Graduate Program in Musical Theater Writing faculty and he has been the Artistic Head of the Musical Theater Lab at the Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Massachusetts for the past four years.
  
  wn.com/William_Finn
• 
  Woody Allen
  Woody Allen (born Allan Stewart Konigsberg, December 1, 1935) is an award-winning American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, and playwright, whose career spans over half a century.
  He began as a comedy writer in the 1950s, penning jokes and scripts for television and also publishing several books of short humor pieces. In the early 1960s, Allen started performing as a stand-up comic, emphasizing monologues rather than traditional jokes. As a comic, he developed the persona of an insecure, intellectual, fretful nebbish, which he insists is quite different from his real-life personality. In 2004, Comedy Central ranked Allen in fourth place on a list of the 100 greatest stand-up comics, while a UK survey ranked Allen as the third greatest comedian.
  By the mid-1960s Allen was writing and directing films, first specializing in slapstick comedies before moving into more dramatic material influenced by European art films during the 1970s. He is often identified as part of the New Hollywood wave of filmmakers of the mid-1960s to late '70s. Allen often stars in his own films, typically in the persona he developed as a standup. The best-known of his over 40 films include the Academy Award-winners Annie Hall (1977), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) and Midnight in Paris (2011); and the Golden Globe-winning The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985). Critic Roger Ebert has described Allen as "a treasure of the cinema."
  
  wn.com/Woody_Allen

• The Informant
• Meet Mark
• Car Meeting
• The Raid
• Multi-Tasking
• Polygraph
• Boxes
• After Car
• Trust Me (instrumental)
• Sellout
• Triplets
• Golf
• Trust Me
• The Informant! (Solo Piano)

• Opening: I Hope I Get It
• I Can Do That
• At the Ballet
• Sing!
• Montage, Part 1: Hello Twelve, Hello Thirteen, Hello Love
• Montage, Part 2: Mother
• Montage, Part 3: Gimme the Ball
• Nothing
• Dance: Ten; Looks: Three
• The Music and the Mirror
• One
• What I Did for Love
• One (reprise) / Finale

• The Way We Were (feat. Barbra Streisand)
• Red Sails in the Sunset
• Look What I've Got
• Like Pretty
• River Stay Way From My Door
• The Way We Were (instrumental)
• Katie
• In the Mood
• Did You Know It Was Me?
• Remembering
• Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams (and Dream Your Troubles Away)
• The Way We Were (finale) (feat. Barbra Streisand)

• Opening: I Hope I Get It
• I Can Do That
• At the Ballet
• Sing!
• Montage, Part 1: Hello Twelve, Hello Thirteen, Hello Love
• Montage, Part 2: Nothing
• Montage, Part 3: Mother
• Montage, Part 4: Gimme the Ball
• Dance: Ten; Looks: Three
• The Music and the Mirror
• One
• What I Did for Love
• One (reprise) / Finale

• Love Theme
• Train Ride to Brooklyn
• Returning the Tray
• Coney Island Fun
• Songs Without Words
• Emily Dickinson
• Aren't All Women Like You?
• Rite on the Brooklyn Bridge
• Stingo; Polish Lullaby
• Nathan Returns
• Southern Plantation
• I'll Never Leave You
• Stingo & Sophie Together
• Ample Make This Bed
• End Credits

• Nobody Does It Better
• Bond 77
• Ride to Atlantis
• Mojave Club
• Nobody Does It Better (instrumental)
• Anya
• The Tanker
• The Pyramids
• Eastern Lights
• Conclusion
• End Titles (Nobody Does It Better)

• The Column
• I Could Get You in JJ
• I Cannot Hear the City
• Welcome to the Night
• Laughin' All the Way to the Bank
• At the Fountain
• Don't Know Where You Leave Off
• What If
• For Susan
• One Track Mind
• Break It Up
• Rita's Tune
• Dirt
• I Could Get You in JJ (reprise)
• I Cannot Hear the City (reprise)
• Don't Look Now
• At the Fountain (reprise)
• Finale

• Main Title / In questa reggia
• Got Any Scotch?
• An Ad?
• In a Sentimental Mood
• Rose Sees Greg
• Alex Hurts Rose
• The Dating Montage
• My Intentions?
• You Picked Me!
• A Funny Kind of Proposal
• Picnic in the Park
• Greg Falls for Rose
• Try a Little Tenderness
• The Mirror
• Going Back to Mom
• Rocking in the Chair
• The Power Inside of Me
• Rose Leaves Greg
• Ruby
• Rose Dumps Alex
• Greg Claims Rose
• The Apology / Nessun dorma
• I Finally Found Someone
• All of My Life

• I Hope I Get It
• Who Am I Anyway?
• I Can Do That
• At the Ballet
• Surprise, Surprise
• Nothing
• Let Me Dance for You
• Dance: Ten; Looks: Three
• One (Rehearsal)
• What I Did for Love
• One (Finale)

• Opening: Ich hoff, ich schaff es
• Das ist nicht schwer
• Im Ballett
• Sing!
• Montage: Hallo Zwölf / Mutter / Gimmer den Ball
• Gar nichts
• Typ Drei: Spitz und rund
• Musik und ein Spiegel
• Steptanz
• Eins
• Ich bereu es nie
• Finale

• Theme From Ice Castles (Through the Eyes of Love)
• They Threw Flowers
• Scarlotti Suite 1
• Deborah's Rock
• Theme From Ice Castles (instrumental)
• Voyager
• Touch
• Learning Again
• Finale

• Fallin'
• Workin' It Out
• If He Really Knew Me
• They're Playing My Song (His)
• They're Playing My Song (Hers)
• Right
• Just for Tonight
• Entre Act (instrumental)
• When You're in My Arms
• If He Really Knew Me (reprise)
• I Still Believe in Love
• Fill in the Words
• They're Playing Our Song (The Bows)

• Main Titles (Incl. "Quiero La Noche" by The Yomo Toro Trio)
• Porno (Contains dialogue)
• The Muggers / The Good Citizen
• A Whirlwind Romance
• A Religious Dream
• Off to San Marcos
• Revolutionaries
• Training
• Survival
• Kidnap
• The Victory
• Back in the U.S.A. / A Chance Meeting
• Miss America Sings / The TV Ad
• Finale / End Titles (Incl. "Cause I Believe in Loving" by Jake Holmes)