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Ivor Novello: Noel Coward
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Born in Wales in 1893 as David Ivor Davies, Ivor Novello took his stage name from his mother, singer and voice teacher Clara Novello Davies. He shot to fame overnight with his 1914 song ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’, one of the most famous songs of World War 1. Like his contemporary Noël Coward, Novello was a multi-talented matinee idol on stage and film, a writer and composer. He ... wrote plays for himself to star in, including The Rat in 1924, followed by Symphony in Two Flats, The Truth Game and Proscenium.
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Comparisons between Ivor Novello and Noël Coward are inevitable. Both were virtual one-man shows, equally adept at writing, composing, acting, and directing. Indeed, the story is told of Coward's asking for complimentary tickets at a suburban theater box office, explaining that he had written, composed, and directed the production currently playing there, and the woman in the box office responding with "A regular little Ivor Novello, aren't we." Of the two, Coward was unquestionably the better composer and writer; his dialogue could be brittle and witty while Novello's was basically sentimental. Novello was the more handsome, but he was a little too beautiful and fey, almost too handsome to be taken seriously as an actor. The major difference is in the two men's film careers. While Coward made an easy transition to films as actor, writer, and director, Novello was only a leading man on screen, immensely popular in Britain, but only moderately so in the United States.
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Novello, who was unashamedly gay and lived for most of his adult life with the actor Bobby Andrews, was astonishingly good-looking himself. As Coward once quipped: “There are two perfect things in this world - my mind and Ivor’s profile!” This beauty launched him into an unexpected career as a film star, from 1919 to 1934, and this developed to the point where he was Britain’s biggest male silent movie star. Alfred Hitchcock’s first major success, The Lodger (1926), was a Novello vehicle.
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Novello's persona was that of a handsome bachelor made for romantic melodrama and adventure. As such, he dominated the English stage from the 1920s until his death in 1951, rivaled only by another notably versatile actor-writer-composer, Noël Coward.
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Novello was a longstanding friend and rival of Noel Coward, who is getting his own Mackintosh makeover when the Albery is renamed in autumn 2006. His reputation is nowhere near as high as Coward’s these days, but in his lifetime he was just as well known and, in terms of West End musical theatre, vastly more successful.
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Novello and his partner, the actor Robert Andrews, were devoted, rarely seen without the other. Coward found "Ivor and Bobby" often "beguiling," but they could ... ramble on "ad nauseam" about a topic--especially the month Novello spent in prison in 1944 for misusing wartime petrol coupons. They forever lamented the "injustice" of it all.
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