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Broadway singer Stephen Sondheim has died at the age of 91 | Obituaries Issues

Singer-songwriter Stephen Sondheim, a well-known actor, died Friday at the age of 91, The New York Times reported.

Attorney F Richard Pappas told the newspaper that Sondheim – best known for West Side Story and Sweeney Todd – died suddenly at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut, the day after Thanksgiving with friends.

“No words. He had it all. And the music. He was incomparable,” the Stephen Sondheim Society of the UK, who volunteered to promote and study his work, wrote three heart-rendered emojis, one of which was broken.

“He was God to many of us. We loved his work. And God was good. “

Born March 22, 1930, to a wealthy New York City family, Sondheim has been involved in theater since childhood.

He started playing the piano at the age of seven and, after his parents divorced and moved to Pennsylvania with his mother, learned to write songs with his neighbor Oscar Hammerstein II, and his friend Richard Rodgers recorded well-known performances including The Sound of Music.

Sondheim excelled at Broadway in 1957 with West Side Story, which transferred Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to Manhattan for staff.

Subsequent successes included Sweeney Todd, about a London killer who tortured victims as meat pies, opened in 1979, and Into the Woods, which aired on Broadway in 1987 and used children’s fairy tales to seduce adult ambitions.

“I love dramas like music, and the whole idea of ​​going to the audience and laughing at them, making them cry – making them feel – is very important to me,” Sondheim said in an interview with National Public Radio in 2013.

‘Sing your songs to time indefinite’

Sondheim won numerous awards for his work including eight Grammy Awards, and eight Tony awards, as well as special Lifetime Achievement honors in Theater. He also won an Academy Award and a Pulitzer Prize, and was nominated for several Grammys and Tonys, as well as two Golden Globes.

In 2015, former US President Barack Obama awarded Sondheim the Presidential Medal of Excellence, which is the highest honor for ordinary people, for all his work.

Several Sondheim songs have been transformed into films including West Side Story in 1961, which won an Oscar, and Into the Woods, sung by Meryl Streep, in 2007. A new West Side Story song, directed by Steven Spielberg, is set to be. released next month.

Lin-Manuel Miranda, who co-produced the well-known rap song Hamilton and was instructed by Sondheim, named him the best actor in theaters.

Sondheim, a former sex offender, claims to have lived alone until she was in her 60’s, keeping her sexual activity to herself. In 2017, she married her friend Jeffrey Romley, who survived.

“Thank the Lord that Sondheim lived 91 years so he had the time to write some great songs with great words! tweet singer Barbra Streisand.

Singer and singer Lea Salonga, who was the first Asian woman to win Tony for inaugurating the Miss Saigon title, thanked Sondheim for “her many contributions to the singing industry”.

“We will sing your songs forever. Oh, my heart aches,” she wrote on Twitter.




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