Cole Porter

Porter wrote his own words as well as his own music. Born in Peru, Indiana, into money, he studied piano and violin as a child, passed through Yale — where he left behind football songs still sung there — and Harvard, and lived in Paris, Venice and New York. His songs include Night and Day, Begin the Beguine, I Get a Kick Out of You, It's De-Lovely and Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye. For the stage he wrote Anything Goes in 1934, Du Barry Was a Lady, Can-Can, Silk Stockings, and in 1948 Kiss Me, Kate — the first winner of the Tony Award for Best Musical, in 1949. He worked for Broadway and Hollywood into the mid-1950s. He died in 1964. A grandfather had intended him for the law, and he went against it. A fall from a horse in 1937 left him disabled and in constant pain, and he went on working through it. Fifty Million Frenchmen belongs to the stage list, and I've Got You Under My Skin, You're the Top, My Heart Belongs to Daddy and Well, Did You Evah to the songs, while the film scores include Born to Dance and Rosalie.