Porter, Cole

(1891-1964)

   Prolific songwriter Cole Porter was educated at Worcester Academy, Yale, and Harvard’s law and music schools. Having already written several musical comedies and hundreds of songs while at Yale, in 1916 he and T. Lawrason Riggs wrote a musical comedy, See America First, produced on Broadway in 1916. Porter went to France in 1917. A number of his songs were included in English musical shows from 1918 to 1922. Porter’s music was part of Within the Quota, performed in Paris and New York in 1923, the Greenwich Village Follies in New York in 1924, Paris in 1928 also in New York, La Revue des Ambassadeurs performed in Paris in 1928, and Wake Up and Dream performed in London in 1929. Porter rose to even greater prominence in the 1930s with songs for shows and movies, the most famous being “Night and Day” from The Gay Divorcee (1932), “I Get a Kick out of You” from Anything Goes (1934), “Begin the Beguine” from Jubilee (1935), “I’ve Got You under My Skin” from the movie Born to Dance (1936), and “In the Still of the Night” from the film Rosalie (1937). He continued to write throughout the 1940s and 1950s, most notably for Kiss Me, Kate (1948), Can-Can (1953), and the film High Society (1956), for which his song “True Love” won an Academy Award. However, Porter’s sophisticated, languid, and often sensual music seemed to belong more appropriately in the interwar period.

   See also Cinema; Literature and theater.