Stephen Sondheim

American composer and lyricist whose scores include the lyrics for West Side Story (1957) and Gypsy (1959) and the words and music for A Little Night Music (1973). "Send in the Clowns", a song from the latter musical, became Sondheim's best-known song. His honours include an Oscar, nine Tonys, eight Grammys, the New York Drama Critics Award, a Pulitzer Prize, a Laurence Olivier Award, and a 2015 Presidential Medal of Freedom. He co-authored many films and TV productions, and frequently worked in collaboration. His homosexuality was made public in a 1999 biography, Stephen Sondheim: A Life.

Sondheim was the only child of a father who was a prominent New York dress manufacturer, and a rejecting and controlling mother, Janet, known to friends and associates as "Foxy", first a fashion designer and then an interior decorator. A precocious child, he picked out tunes on the piano at the age of four and in first grade read his way through the New York Times. His life was in upheaval when, at age ten, his parents divorced and his mother sent him to military school. His dad remarried and produced two younger stepbrothers. His mother threatened to jail his dad if Sondheim ever saw his stepmother because she was an "immoral woman," while Foxy was the one who acted in an inappropriately seductive way with her son.

Military school agreed with Sondheim because he loved rules and order. After the divorce he and his mother moved to Doylestown, Pennsylvania where Oscar Hammerstein II, an old friend of the family, had a farm. The Hammersteins had a son, Jimmy, who was Sondheim's age and he spent so much of his spare time at the celebrated lyricist's home that the Hammersteins became a surrogate family to him. Hammerstein introduced him to the musical theatre and at the age of 15 Sondheim and two classmates wrote a musical, By George, for the George School. Showing his score to his mentor, he asked him to criticize it objectively.