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Dateline: 13th September, 2004
Fred Ebb Fred Ebb, whose partnership of almost forty years with John Kander gave rise to such music theatre hits as Cabaret and Chicago, has died of a heart attack. The lyricist died on Saturday at his home, said David McKeown, an assistant to composer John Kander, Ebb's longtime collaborator. Ebb always was "sweetly vague" about his age, said director Scott Ellis, who worked with him on several shows, and, in fact, he has been variously described as being 71 and 76. The partnership won Tony Awards for the scores of Cabaret, Woman of the Year and Kiss of the Spider Woman and the 2002 film version of Chicago, directed by Rob Marshall, won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Ebb, who was educated at New York University and Columbia, began his career as a lyricist of Broadway shows in 1960 when he contributed to the revue From A to Z which has a short run that year. In the early sixties music publisher Tommy Valando partnered him with John Kander and one of their first collaborations, My Colouring Book, was recored by Barbra Streisand. They were then hired by Hal Prince to write the musical Flora the Red Menace, which starred the 19-year old Liza Minelli in 1965. The show was not a great success - although Dundee Rep's revival of June of this year established its reputation in the UK - but Prince hired them for his next project, a musical based on Christopher Isherwood's I am a Camera, which was itself based on his Berlin Stories. That musical, of course, was Cabaret and it established Kander and Ebb as major figures in the world of music theatre. Their other greatest hits - Woman of the Year (1981), starring Lauren Bacall, and Kiss of the Spiderwoman (1990), starring Chita Rivera - were followed in 1997 by their last Broadway collaboration, Steel Pier, which starred Karen Ziémba, who had made her name in And the World Goes Round (1991), a revue based in their work. In all, Ebb was nominated for eleven Tonys and in 2003 both he and Kander were designated "Living Landmarks" by The Landmark Conservancy. He leaves no close relatives. Please note that all three Archive indices are very long and will therefore take some time to download.
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