Ivor Novello (born David Ivor Davies; 15 January 1893 – 6 March 1951) was a Welsh composer and actor who became one of the most popular British entertainers of the first half of the 20th century. He was born into a musical family, and his first successes were as a songwriter. His first big hit was "Keep the Home Fires Burning" (1914), which was enormously popular during the First World War. His 1917 show, Theodore & Co, was a wartime hit. After the war, Novello contributed numbers to several successful musical comedies and was eventually commissioned to write the scores of complete shows. He wrote his musicals in the style of operetta and often composed his music to the libretti of Christopher Hassall. In the 1920s, he turned to acting, first in British films and then on stage, with considerable success in both. He starred in two silent films directed by Alfred Hitchcock, The Lodger and Downhill (both 1927). On stage, he played the title character in the first London production of Liliom (1926). Novello briefly went to Hollywood, but he soon returned to Britain, where he had more successes, especially on stage, appearing in his own lavish West End productions of musicals. The best known of these were Glamorous Night (1935) and The Dancing Years (1939). From the 1930s, he often performed with Zena Dare, writing parts for her in his works. He continued to write for film, but he had his biggest late successes with stage musicals: Perchance to Dream (1945), King's Rhapsody (1949) and Gay's the Word (1951). The Ivor Novello Awards were named after him in 1955. BiographyNovello was born David Ivor Davies in Cardiff, Wales, to David Davies (c. 1852–1931), a rent collector for the city council, and his wife, Clara Novello Davies, an internationally known singing teacher and choral conductor. As a boy, Novello was a successful singer in the Welsh Eisteddfod. His mother set up as voice teacher in London, where he met leading performers of London. Novello was educated privately in Cardiff and then in Gloucester, where he studied harmony and counterpoint with Herbert Brewer, the cathedral organist. From there he won a scholarship to Magdalen College School in Oxford, where he was a solo treble in the college choir. He later said that this prolonged youthful exposure to early sacred choral music had turned his tastes, in reaction, to lush romantic music. From his early youth Novello showed a facility for writing songs, and when he was only 15, one of his songs was published. After leaving school, he gave piano lessons in Cardiff, and then moved to London in 1913 with his mother. They took a flat above the Strand Theatre, which became his London home for the rest of his life. In London he found a mentor in Sir Edward Marsh, a well-known patron of the arts and Churchill's secretary who encouraged him to compose and introduced him to people who could help his career. He adopted his mother's middle name, "Novello", as his professional surname, although he did not change it legally until 1927. In 1914, at the start of the First World War, Novello wrote "Keep the Home Fires Burning", a song that expressed the feelings of innumerable families sundered by World War I. Novello composed the music for the song to a lyric by the American Lena Guilbert Ford, and it became a huge popular success, bringing Novello money and fame at the age of 21. He avoided enlistment until June 1916, when he reported to a Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) training depot as a probationary flight sub-lieutenant. After Novello twice crashed aeroplanes, Marsh arranged his move to the Admiralty office in central London for the rest of the war. Novello continued to write songs while serving in the RNAS. He had his first stage success with Theodore & Co in 1916. In 1917 Marsh introduced him to the actor Bobbie Andrews, who became Novello's life partner. Andrews introduced Novello to the young Noël Coward. Coward, six years Novello's junior, was deeply envious of Novello's effortless glamour. He wrote, "I just felt suddenly conscious of the long way I had to go before I could break into the magic atmosphere in which he moved and breathed with such nonchalance". In 1918 and after the war, Novello continued to write successfully for musical comedy and revue. The former included Who's Hooper? (1919), and The Golden Moth by Thompson and P. G. Wodehouse (1921), for which Novello provided the entire score. At the same time as his successes as a composer, Novello was making a career as an actor. With "a classic profile that gained him matinee idol status amongst the film-going public", he was sought out, on the strength of a publicity photograph, by the Swiss film director Louis Mercanton. Mercanton offered him a silent-film role as the romantic lead in The Call of the Blood (1920) and then in Miarka. Novello made his first British film, Carnival, the following year. Novello made his stage debut in 1921 in Deburau by Sacha Guitry, and, among other stage engagements in the next years, he played Bingley in a charity adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. At about this time, Novello had a short-lived affair with the writer Siegfried Sassoon. In 1923, Novello made his American movie debut in D. W. Griffith's The White Rose. He next co-wrote, produced and starred in the successful 1924 play The Rat. The play was made into a film in 1925, which was so successful that two sequels followed in 1926 and 1928. Other films in which Novello starred included Alfred Hitchcock's The Lodger, where he played the title character, and Downhill (both in 1927). During the late 1920s, Novello was the most popular male British film star and was often dubbed as Britain's "handsomest screen actor". The British film company Gainsborough Pictures offered Novello a lucrative contract, which enabled him to buy a country house in Littlewick Green, near Maidenhead. He renamed the property Redroofs, and he entertained there famously and with little regard for convention. Cecil Beaton, noting the frequent homosexual excesses, coined the phrase, "the Ivor – Noel naughty set". Noel Coward had by now caught Novello up professionally. In 1928 Novello starred in the silent adaptation of Coward's much more successful The Vortex, and made his last silent film, A South Sea Bubble. Novello returned to composing for the lyric stage in 1929, writing eight numbers for the revue The House that Jack Built. His successful Broadway production The Truth Game brought him to the attention of Hollywood studios. He accepted a contract to write for and appear in MGM films. He found little to do in Hollywood, however, and returned to London. After beginning the 1930s with a series of non-musical plays, Novello returned to composition in 1935 with Glamorous Night, which was the first of a series of enormously popular musicals. The Times considered that it was for these that Novello would be popularly remembered. The last of Novello's prewar musicals was The Dancing Years, which closed on the outbreak of the Second World War, and reopened at the Adelphi Theatre, running for a combined total of 696 performances, closing on 8 July 1944. This show was the closest Novello came to fulfilling his mother's early ambitions for him to write operas. Novello presented only two new shows during the Second World War. Arc de Triomphe (1943), was only a modest success, but Perchance to Dream (1945) was immensely successful, running for 1,022 performances. In between the two shows, Novello had been in serious legal trouble and served four weeks in prison for misuse of petrol coupons, a serious offence under rationing laws in wartime Britain. Novello's last full-scale production in this style was King's Rhapsody (1949). After the rigours of war, this escapist entertainment starring Novello and Zena Dare had strong box-office appeal, and ran for 841 performances. It was still running, at the Palace Theatre, when Novello's last show Gay's the Word (1951) opened. It was a departure from his established pattern, balancing the contrasting styles of European operetta and post-war American musicals. Novello died suddenly from a coronary thrombosis at the age of 58, a few hours after completing a performance of King's Rhapsody. He was cremated at the Golders Green Crematorium, and his ashes are buried beneath a lilac bush and marked with a plaque that reads "Ivor Novello 6th March 1951 'Till you are home once more'." He left an estate worth £160,000 (£5 million in 2019).
Only a few weeks before Novello's death, Noel Coward had written of him: "Theatre – good, bad and indifferent – is the love of his life. For him, other human endeavours are mere shadows. ... The reward of his work lies in the indisputable fact that whenever and wherever he appears the vast majority of the British public flock to see him." The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians writes of Novello that he was "until the advent of Andrew Lloyd Webber, the 20th-century's most consistently successful composer of British musicals". The Ivor Novello Awards for songwriting, established in 1955 in Novello's memory, are awarded each year by the The Ivors Academy to British songwriters and composers as well as to an outstanding international music writer. Ivor Novello was portrayed in Robert Altman's 2001 film Gosford Park by Jeremy Northam, and several of his songs were used for the film's soundtrack. In 2005, the Strand Theatre, above which Novello lived for many years, was renamed the Novello Theatre, with a plaque in his honour set at the entrance.
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Carolina Herrera (born 8 January 1939) is a Venezuelan-American fashion designer known for exceptional personal style, and for dressing various First Ladies, including Jacqueline Onassis, Laura Bush, Michelle Obama, and Melania Trump. BiographyMaría Carolina Josefina Pacanins y Niño was born on 8 January 1939, in Caracas, Venezuela, to Guillermo Pacanins Acevedo, an air force officer and former governor of Caracas, and María Cristina Niño Passios. Her socialite grandmother introduced her to the world of fashion, taking young Carolina to shows by Cristobal Balenciaga. In 1957, at the age of 18, Carolina married Guillermo Behrens Tello, a Venezuelan landowner. They became the parents of two daughters: Mercedes Behrens-Pacanins; Ana Luisa Behrens-Pacanins(who married developer Luis Paraud-Carpena, the son of Maj. Gen. Fernando Paraud of Madrid, in 1989). In 1964, Carolina and her husband divorced. In 1965, Carolina began her career working as a publicist for Emilio Pucci, an Italian fashion designer and Florentine Marquis and a close family friend. She began working at Pucci's Caracas boutique, and moved to New York in 1980. Frequently associating with Mick and Bianca Jagger and Andy Warhol, at Studio 54, Carolina became well known for her dramatic style. In 1968, in Caracas, Carolina married Reinaldo Herrera Guevara, the host of Buenos Días, a Venezuelan morning-television news program and later special-projects editor of Vanity Fair magazine. Reinaldo was the elder son of Don Reinaldo Herrera Uslar, 4th Marquis of Torre Casa, a prominent Venezuelan sugarcane plantation owner, aristocrat and art collector. Upon his father's death in 1962, Reinaldo had inherited the Spanish title The 5th Marquis of Torre Casa Therefore, by marriage, Carolina held the title The Marquise consort of Torre Casa, until it was retracted in 1992, as Reinaldo had issued no son. Together, they have two daughters: Carolina Adriana Herrera-Pacanins (b. 1969), and Patricia Cristina Herrera-Pacanins. Carolina first appeared on the International Best Dressed List in 1972, then was elected to its Hall of Fame in 1980. In 1981, her friend Diana Vreeland, then Editor-in-Chief of Vogue suggested that Carolina design a clothing line. She did so, having samples made in Caracas, and debuted her collection at Manhattan's Metropolitan Club to critical acclaim. A well known Park Avenue boutique, Martha's, agreed to showcase her clothing in their prominent windows. Upon this initial success, she returned to Caracas and raised capital to fund a more formal launch. Her brand received recognition from several key publications that same year, including Women's Wear Daily and Tatler, with particular early attention to her well designed sleeves. A few of her most notable clients have included Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who asked her to design the dress for her daughter Caroline's wedding; Diana, Duchess of Cadaval, who asked her to design the dress for her marriage with Prince Charles-Philippe of Orléans, Duke of Anjou; and actress Renée Zellweger. In the late 1980s, Spanish fragrance company Puig licensed the Carolina Herrera name to develop and market a line of perfumes. In 1995, the firm acquired the Carolina Herrera fashion business, retaining her as Creative Director. In 2008, they launched a ready-to-wear brand called CH Carolina Herrera. Since 1999 Herrera has been on the board of the Council of Fashion Designers of America(CFDA). In 2004, Herrera was awarded "Womenswear Designer of the Year" and in 2008 the Geoffrey Beene Lifetime Achievement Award from the CFDA. In 2009, Herrera became a naturalized United States citizen. As of 2011, her daughters Carolina Jr. and Patricia Lansing participated in the creative direction and design. As of 2012, there were 18 Carolina Herrera and CH Carolina Herrera boutiques in the world, and her lines were carried in 280 stores in 104 countries. That same year, she received the Fashion Group International Superstar Award, the Style Awards Designer of the Year. In 2014, she earned the 2014 Couture Council Award for Artistry of Fashion. In 2015, the first advertising for the brand was released, featuring models Elisabeth Erm and Joséphine Le Tutour. In February 2016, it was reported by WWD that the fragrance side of the business had more than 25,000 points of sale across the globe while the CH brand included 129 freestanding stores. In July 2016, Herrera announced the release of her new women's fragrance to be available for purchase in September, her biggest fragrance launch in 14 years. The scent is called 'Good Girl' and Karlie Kloss is the face of the fragrance. In 2018, Herrera showed her last line for her eponymous brand and handed creative directorship of the brand over to Wes Gordon. Further interestProfileLoretta Young (born Gretchen Young; 6 January 1913 – 12 August, 2000) was an American actress. Starting as a child actress, she had a long and varied career in film from 1917 to 1953. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in the film The Farmer's Daughter (1947), and received her second Academy Award nomination for her role in Come to the Stable (1949). Young moved to the relatively new medium of television, where she had a dramatic anthology series, The Loretta Young Show, from 1953 to 1961. The series earned three Emmy Awards, and was re-run successfully on daytime TV and later in syndication. In the 1980s, Young returned to the small screen and won a Golden Globe for her role in Christmas Eve in 1986. BiographyLoretta Young was born Gretchen Young in Salt Lake City, Utah, the daughter of Gladys and John Earle Young. When she was two years old, her parents separated, and when she was three, her mother moved the family to Hollywood. She and her sisters Polly Ann and Elizabeth Jane (better known as Sally Blane) all worked as child actresses, but of the three, Gretchen was the most successful. Young's first role was at the age of two or three in the silent film Sweet Kitty Bellairs. During her high-school years she was educated at Ramona Convent Secondary School. She was signed to a contract by John McCormick, husband and manager of actress Colleen Moore, who saw the young girl's potential. Moore gave her the name Loretta, explaining that it was the name of her favorite doll. Young was billed as Gretchen Young in the silent film Sirens of the Sea (1917). She was first billed as Loretta Young in 1928, in The Whip Woman. In 1929, she was named one of the WAMPAS Baby Stars. In 1930, when she was 17, she eloped with 26-year-old actor Grant Withers with whom she was married in Yuma, Arizona. The marriage was annulled the next year, just as their second movie together (ironically entitled Too Young to Marry) was released. From September 1933 to June 1934, she had a well publicized affair with actor Spencer Tracy (who was married to Louise Tracy), her co-star in Man's Castle. In 1934 Young co-starred with Cary Grant in Born to be Bad, and in 1935 co starred with Clark Gable in the film version of Jack London's The Call of the Wild, directed by William Wellman. During filming, the two had an affair. Young was then 22 years old; Gable was 34 and married. Young became pregnant by Gable. Young, a devout Catholic, considered abortion a mortal sin, so when her pregnancy began to advance, she went on a "vacation" to England. Young gave birth to a daughter, Judith, on November 6, 1935, in Venice, California. Young named Judith after St. Jude because he was the patron saint of (among other things) difficult situations. Weeks after her birth, Judith was placed in an orphanage where she spent the next 19 months in various "hideaways and orphanages" before being re-united with her mother; Young then claimed that she had adopted Judith. In 1940, Young married producer Tom Lewis. They had two sons: Peter Lewis (of the San Francisco rock band Moby Grape); and Christopher Lewis, a film director. Judith, Young's daughter by Clark Gable, took Lewis's last name. Young and Lewis divorced in the mid-1960s. In 1947, Young won an Oscar for her performance in The Farmer's Daughter. That same year, she co-starred with Cary Grant and David Niven in The Bishop's Wife, a perennial favorite, which was remade in 1996 as The Preacher's Wife starring Denzel Washington, Whitney Houston & Courtney B. Vance. In 1949, she received another Academy Award nomination for Come to the Stable. In 1953, she appeared in her last theatrical film, It Happens Every Thursday, a Universal comedy about a New York couple who move to California to take over a struggling weekly newspaper; her co-star was John Forsythe. After her career as film actress basically finished in 1953, Young started her work in Television. She hosted and starred in the well-received half-hour anthology television series Letter to Loretta (soon retitled The Loretta Young Show), which was originally broadcast from 1953 to 1961. She earned three Emmy awards for the program. Her trademark was a dramatic entrance through a living room door in various high-fashion evening gowns. She returned at the program's conclusion to offer a brief passage from the Bible or a famous quote that reflected upon the evening's story. The program ran in prime time on NBC for eight years, the longest-running primetime network program hosted by a woman up to that time. From the time of Young's retirement in the 1960s until not long before her death, she devoted herself to volunteer work for charities and churches with her friends of many years: Jane Wyman, Irene Dunne, and Rosalind Russell. Young briefly came out of retirement to star in two television films: Christmas Eve (1986) and Lady in a Corner (1989). She won a Golden Globe Award for the former and was nominated for the latter. In 1988, Young received the Women in Film Crystal Award for outstanding women who through their endurance and the excellence of their work helped expand the role of women in the entertainment industry. In 1993, Young married for the third and final time, to the fashion designer Jean Louis, who has designed the Marilyn Monore dress which she worn for Jack Kennedy's birthday in 1962. Their marriage lasted until his death in April 1997. Loretta Young died of ovarian cancer on 12 August 2000, at the home of her maternal half-sister, Georgiana Montalbán (the wife of actor Ricardo Montalban) in Santa Monica, California. She was interred in the family plot in Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California. Her ashes were buried in the grave of her mother, Gladys Belzer. Through her life, Loretta Young refused to confirm or comment publicly on the real identity of her daughter Judith Lewis until 1999, when Joan Wester Anderson wrote Young's authorized biography. In interviews with Anderson for the book, Young stated that Lewis was her biological child and the product of a brief affair with Gable. Young would not allow the book to be published until after her death. |
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