- Born
- 22 March 1930New York City, USA
- Died
- 26 November 2021Roxbury, Connecticut, USA · aged 91
Stephen Sondheim
He reinvented the Broadway musical with “Company”, “Sweeney Todd” and “Into the Woods” – and found love only late in life.
Stephen Sondheim grew up in New York in a wealthy but unhappy family. After his parents’ divorce, the lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, a family friend, became his mentor and father figure and taught him how to write musicals.
At 27 he wrote the lyrics for “West Side Story” (1957), and later for “Gypsy”. He then wrote both music and lyrics for a series of musicals that changed the form: “Company” (1970), about a single man and his married friends, “Follies”, “A Little Night Music”, the dark thriller “Sweeney Todd” (1979), “Sunday in the Park with George”, which won the Pulitzer Prize, and “Into the Woods” (1987). His songs are complex, witty and full of ambivalence.
Sondheim said that he came to terms with being gay only around the age of forty and that he was not comfortable in relationships for a long time. He lived for some years with the playwright Peter Jones, and in 2017 he married the much younger technology entrepreneur Jeff Romley.
He received eight Tony Awards and the Presidential Medal of Freedom and worked until the end of his life. He died at his home in Connecticut in 2021, aged 91.