Lionel Bart earned acclaim as a lyricist and composer by devising the popular 1960s stage musical Oliver! and by supplying the main theme for the 1963 James Bond picture From Russia With Love; observers have also noted his role in restoring vitality to the English musical tradition.
Born Lionel Beglieter in 1932 as the child of a Jewish tailor in London’s East End, he never received formal musical instruction yet rose to prominence as a tunesmith, crafting successful numbers for Tommy Steele and Anthony Newley. His earliest musical, Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be, reached the stage in 1959 and held the London boards for two years, while Lock Up Your Daughters also opened that year.
Oliver! arrived in 1960; drawn from Charles Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist, the show met with instant acclaim and later returned in well-received London revivals during 1967 and 1977. A New York mounting began on January 6, 1963, enjoyed Broadway success, and brought Bart a Tony Award. Additional stage works followed, among them Blitz! in 1962, Maggie May in 1964, Twang! in 1965, and La Strada in 1969.
Bart elected to sell his interests in Oliver! and other properties, partly to fund the 1965 Robin Hood musical Twang!, a choice that proved unwise. Columbia Pictures brought Oliver! to the screen in 1968 under the direction of Carol Reed, with Ron Moody portraying Fagin, Jack Wild as the Artful Dodger, Oliver Reed as Bill Sykes, Shani Wallis as Nancy, and Mark Lester in the title role. The widely seen film earned eleven Academy Award nominations, including those for Best Actor (Ron Moody), Best Supporting Actor (Jack Wild), and Best Adapted Screenplay (Vernon Gilbert Harris), and captured the awards for Best Picture, Art Direction (Terence Marsh, Ken Muggleston), Sound (John Cox), Musical Score (John Green), and Choreography (Onna White). Its soundtrack, released on CD by RCA/BMG in 1988, preserves such lasting numbers as “Consider Yourself,” “Food,” and the frequently recorded “Where Is Love?”; Columbia/Tristar Home Video later issued the picture on DVD in August 1998 and on VHS.
While in Los Angeles that same year, Bart visited his acquaintance Sid Krofft of Sid & Marty Krofft Television Productions, who was then seeking a juvenile lead for the NBC Saturday-morning series H.R. Pufnstuf; after being struck by Jack Wild’s abilities, Krofft located the actor/singer/dancer and placed him under contract.
Bart added to the score of the 1973 Paramount release Scalawag, which featured Kirk Douglas, Mark Lester, Lesley-Anne Down, and Danny DeVito, and he wrote the music for the 1977 play Lionel. Alcoholism and financial difficulties marked his 1970s years, yet during the following decade he composed numerous advertising jingles. Cameron Mackintosh mounted a triumphant London revival of Oliver! in 1994 with Jonathan Pryce as Fagin and, in a gesture uncommon in show business, returned a share of the rights to Bart, thereby providing him with renewed royalty income. Toward the close of his life Bart sought to mount Quasimodo, an early-1960s stage piece he had fashioned from The Hunchback of Notre Dame. He succumbed to cancer on April 3, 1999, at Hammersmith Hospital in London, aged 68.
