Leslie Bricusse
Oscar-winning musicals composer who wrote some of the most memorable show tunes of the 20th century, including Doctor Dolittle, Feeling Good and Goldfinger
In a musical career spanning six decades, Leslie Bricusse produced some of the most memorable show tunes of the 20th century.
As well as writing the music and lyrics for seven stage musicals – among them Scrooge, Goodbye, Mr Chips and Doctor Dolittle – he was the co-writer of the iconic Bond anthem Goldfinger and the hit songs The Candy Man, Who Can I Turn To? and Feeling Good. He won an Oscar for Talk to the Animals from Doctor Dolittle in 1967.
Born in Pinner, Middlesex, in the 1930s, Bricusse was stagestruck from an early age, paying regular visits to the Empire, Leicester Square, when it was a variety theatre.
He was also academic and read modern and medieval languages at Cambridge. As president of Footlights in the early 1950s, he co-wrote his first musical, Lady at the Wheel, which finished up at the Westminster Theatre.
A great believer in professional collaborations, Bricusse was perhaps best known for his partnership with the actor and singer Anthony Newley, whom he first met in the early 1960s. Their first show, Stop the World – I Want to Get Off (1961) was also a big hit in London and New York for Newley and his co-star Anna Quayle.
In an interview with The Stage in 2011, Bricusse described his relationship with Newley: “He was my best friend. We wrote Stop the World in three crazy weeks. He was a big pop star then. We both did everything – music, lyrics, book, sitting together in a room, singing to each other. We laughed our way through it. I adored him. Then he met Joan Collins and we had this terrific ride through the 1960s – the West End, Broadway, Hollywood.”
Songs from Stop the World, notably What Kind of Fool Am I? and Once in a Lifetime, were later recorded by Sammy Davis Jr, Matt Monro and others. What Kind of Fool Am I? won the 1962 Grammy award for song of the year.
The following year saw another Bricusse song, If I Ruled the World, co-written with Cyril Ornadel, from the musical Pickwick starring Harry Secombe, enter the pop charts.
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Bricusse returned to his friend Newley in 1964 to create The Roar of the Greasepaint – the Smell of the Crowd, touted as a "comic allegory about the class system in contemporary Britain”. Though it wasn’t an instant hit, it garnered a cult following, with its best number, Who Can I Turn To? becoming another oft-recorded torch song and the original cast album selling 100,000 copies. Tony Bennett’s recording was already a hit before the show opened on Broadway. In more recent times, Feeling Good from the show was a hit for Michael Bublé.
A pared-down revival of The Roar of the Greasepaint at the Finborough Theatre in 2011 was described by critic Lyn Gardner as an “out-and-out curiosity”.
At the time, Bricusse said: “The score for Greasepaint is better than the score for Stop the World. One of the songs from Greasepaint, Feeling Good, was being recorded by everyone, from Nina Simone to Michael Bublé. Virgin has just spent $10 million on a commercial with Feeling Good as the backing track.”
Bricusse and his wife, Evie, lived in Beverly Hills for many years, before retiring to the south of France, and they liked to socialise with the great and the good of Hollywood. In old age he counted the likes of Michael Caine, Julie Andrews and Joan Collins among his best friends.
In 2015 he staged Pure Imagination: The Songs of Leslie Bricusse, reflecting on his back catalogue of more than 1,000 songs. His tribute show to Sammy Davis Jr, Sammy, starring Giles Terera, was meant to be opening in London last year, but had to be postponed because of the pandemic.
In Pure Imagination, Bricusse revealed that many of his songs came to him in the night. He said: “I wake up at 4am and it’s there immediately. I don’t know if it’s the subconscious mind working, but it just happens. You think more clearly and see what the mistakes are.”
Leslie Bricusse was born on January 29, 1931, and died on October 19, 2021. He is survived by his wife Yvonne (Evie) and their son Adam.
Paying tribute to Bricusse, Andrew Lloyd Webber said: "Leslie was the most underestimated British songwriter of all time. Madeleine and I were once having dinner with Leslie, his wife Evie, Michael Caine and his wife, Shakira. Michael said: “Why haven’t you and Leslie written a song together?” Leslie immediately gave me a title: “The Perfect Song”. I wrote a tune in the taxi home, Leslie wrote the lyrics the next morning and it was then recorded by Michael Ball.
"I also remember at the Oscars three years ago that there were four of Leslie’s songs played in the first half hour. Either as walk-on music or on the commercials: Feeling Good, Who Can I Turn To, Pure Imagination and What Kind of Fool Am I, and never forget he wrote My Old Man’s a Dustman.
"My dear friend Leslie will be greatly missed.”
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