Word: ivor
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...Ivor Novello, a biography by Peter Noble, British theater historian, does full, sometimes fulsome, credit to its flamboyant subject, and tells a success story as pat as any Novello melodrama...
...Song for History. Ivor Novello Davies was born in Cardiff, Wales, the son of David Davies, an accountant, and Clara Davies, a singing teacher. Little Ivor was early set down as a prodigy, at least by his doting mother, because, she said, he cried in perfect thirds. Mother was impatient for promise to become performance. "Darling," she reminded him all through his boyhood, "do you realize that if you died tomorrow, it would not make the slightest difference to the world...
...Ivor turned to song writing in his teens and in 1914, when he was only 21, wrote out one that made him both rich and famous: Keep the Home Fires Burning. It caught the ear of the marching men, and they sang it into history as one of the most popular songs of all time-to the distinct discomfiture of Novello's regular publisher, who rejected...
...Ivor was a national idol overnight. His delicately handsome profile, photographed in a thousand lights, became somehow confused in the public mind with a patriotic poster, and to lonely wives and mothers he became a romantic surrogate for the men away at war. The movies invited him into their realms of gold and in he went...
...Call of the Blood, when it was shown in 1920, puffed Ivor into a fullblown matinee craze, and The Rat, a melodrama which Ivor wrote, produced and starred in, made him a leading figure on the stage as well. Glamorous Night, the first Novello musical (in which he also starred), was a huge hit. The Dancing Years, his fourth musical, ran for ten years. Ivor composed seven musicals before he was through, all beautifully decorated and loaded with the brisk tunes and languid ballads that Britons had learned to expect...