Biography
Ronell was born in Omaha, Nebraska, studied music with Walter Piston, and was married to producer Lester Cowan. The couple had no children.
Ronell was, along with Dorothy Fields, Dana Suesse, and Kay Swift, one of the first successful Hollywood and Tin Pan Alley female composers or librettists. She cowrote Disney's first hit song, "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" with Frank Churchill for the cartoon Three Little Pigs (1933).
She wrote the lyrics and music for the Broadway musical Count Me In (1942) She wrote songs for movies including Champagne Waltz (1937) and Blockade (1938) and wrote the scores for movies including the Cowan produced The Story of G. I. Joe (1945), the film adaptation of the Weill/Nash musical One Touch of Venus (1948), and the Marx Brothers Love Happy (1949). She served as musical director for Main Street to Broadway (1953). She was nominated for Best Song, "Linda," and with co-composer Louis Applebaum for Best Score, for her work on The Story of G. I. Joe.
Ronell was romantically involved with George Gershwin at the time she wrote her most famous song, "Willow Weep for Me" and speculation in the New York City composer community is that Gershwin actually wrote the song and gave her the copyright as a gift. However, this has never been proven and is still, at this point, based on the striking similarities in the song to the blues-inflected style of Gershwin.
Read more about this topic: Ann Ronell
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.”
—Rebecca West [Cicily Isabel Fairfield] (1892–1983)
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)