Patti LuPone Biography
21 April 1949, Northport, Long Island, New York, USA. An actress and singer who left several well-known Hollywood and Broadway stars feeling bitterly disappointed and distraught when she won the role of Norma Desmond in Andrew Lloyd Webber's 1993 London production of Sunset Boulevard. LuPone made her stage debut, tap dancing, at the age of four, and later took dancing classes with Martha Graham. She trained for the stage at the Juilliard School where she met the actor Kevin Kline. A six-year personal relationship was supplemented by a joint association with John Housman's Actor's Company, which gave them both invaluable experience in the straight theatre, and resulted in their appearance together - as the bride and bridegroom - in a short-lived Broadway musical, The Robber Bridegroom (1975). After several other flops, including The Baker's Wife (1976) and Working (1978), LuPone won Tony and Drama Desk Awards for her performance in the leading role of Evita on Broadway, and stayed with the show "until the strain of being obnoxious and dying from cancer every night got too much". She returned to serious theatre in the provinces and had occasionally effective roles in movies such as 1941 and Witness. In 1985, LuPone moved to London and appeared firstly in The Cradle Will Rock. In the same year, she became the first American actress and singer to gain a principal role with the Royal Shakespeare Company, in the hit musical Les Misérables. The names of both shows appeared on her 1985 Olivier Award. In complete contrast to those two roles, in 1986 she played Lady Bird Johnson in a US mini-series based on the ex-President's life, and, a year later, was back on Broadway in an acclaimed revival of Anything Goes. In the late 80s and early 90s LuPone had a major role in the popular US situation comedy Life Goes On, and experienced some difficulty breaking free from her contract when the call came from Lloyd Webber. She first played Norma Desmond at the composer's Sydmonton Festival in the summer of 1992. Declining the use of the book on stage, she learnt the part and gave what was regarded as a "sensational" performance. Soon afterwards it became obvious that she had stolen the role-of-a-lifetime from "under the noses" of bigger names such as Meryl Streep, Angela Lansbury, Liza Minnelli, and Julie Andrews. Sunset Boulevard opened in the West End in July 1993, and although LuPone enjoyed a personal triumph, her contract to take the show to Broadway was cancelled, resulting in a pay-off "in the region of $1 million" (she was replaced by Glenn Close). During the remainder of the 90s LuPone appeared in New York in her own Patti LuPone On Broadway (1995) and as opera diva Maria Callas in Terrence McNally's Master Class on Broadway (1996) and in London (1997). Early in 1999, she took her acclaimed new concert act, Matters Of The Heart, to the Sydney Opera House, in Sydney, Australia. The eclectic programme of original and contemporary music included works by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, Randy Newman, and Cole Porter.
Source: The Encyclopedia of Popular Music by Colin Larkin. Licensed from Muze.
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