Maureen McGovern Biography
Maureen Therese McGovern, 27 July 1949, Youngstown, Ohio, USA. The possessor of "one of the most technically proficient singing voices in all of pop", with a four-octave, coloratura range, as a young girl Maureen McGovern was influenced by Barbra Streisand. After graduating from high school in 1967, she worked as a typist, and performed folk songs in the evenings. She then embarked on a six-year tour of hotels and holiday camps in the Midwest of America, performing contemporary material with a rock band. She came to the attention of 20th Century-Fox Records, who signed her to a contract. Her first recording, in 1972, was Al Kasha and Joel Hirschhorn's "The Morning After", which was used as the love theme for the "disaster" film The Poseidon Adventure. It won an Academy Award for best song, and McGovern's version topped the US chart. In 1974, the media began calling her the "disaster queen" after she sang the Oscar-winning "We May Never Love Like This Again" (Kasha-Hirschhorn) on the soundtrack of The Towering Inferno (McGovern also played a cameo role in the picture), and "Wherever Love Takes Me" (Leslie Bricusse-Don Black), the theme from Gold, a British film starring Roger Moore and Susannah York, in which a South African gold mine is destroyed. Given her recent career history, it was hardly surprising that McGovern was cast as the singing nun, Sister Angelina, in the "disaster-spoof" movie Airplane! in 1980. By that time, she had begun to be known in Britain through her version of "The Continental", and reached the US Top 10 with "Different Worlds", the theme from the television series Angie. She had also recorded "Can You Read My Mind" (Bricusse-John Williams), the love theme from Superman.
In the early 80s, as well as appearing in regional productions of The Sound Of Music and South Pacific, McGovern attracted much acclaim for her performance as the ingénue, Mabel, in Joseph Papp's revival of The Pirates Of Penzance on Broadway. She replaced Karen Akers in the Tony Award-winning musical, Nine, toured with Guys And Dolls, and appeared in a revival of the two-hander musical, I Do! I Do! Around this time McGovern was beginning to establish herself as a classy nightclub performer, singing mainly a blend of jazz and beloved Broadway standards. In particular, she has come to be regarded by many as "the quintessential interpreter of Gershwin", although her programmes also include songs by writers such as Sergio Mendes, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and Shelby Flint. In 1989 McGovern made her solo debut at Carnegie Hall, and as Polly Peachum, with Sting as Macheath, in 3 Penny Opera (a new production of The Threepenny Opera) on Broadway. In the early 90s, she made her London concert debut at the Barbican theatre, and also played in cabaret at the Pizza On The Park and the Café Royal. Her honours include a Canadian Gold Leaf Award (1973), an Australian Gold Award (1975), and the Grand Prize in the 1975 Tokyo Music Festival for her performance of Paul Williams' "Even Better Than I Know Myself". During the late 90s and early 00s McGovern remained a top concert attraction, working with a variety of orchestras including the Arkansas Symphony and New York Pops.
Source: The Encyclopedia of Popular Music by Colin Larkin. Licensed from Muze.
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