Sylvia Fine

Sylvia Fine was a writer, composer, and lyricist and the wife of Danny Kaye. She scripted many of Kaye's famous rapid-fire patter routines and wrote much of his musical material, including all of the songs for The Court Jester. In 1978, Fine wrote music and lyrics for two Sesame Street songs, which went unaired. "Good Clean Dirt" extolled the environmental and natural value of dirt, while "Ev'rybody Orders Me Around" is a child's lament about adults telling them what to do.

Fine was an active creative force in Kaye's career, first writing songs and material for Kaye's club act emphasizing tongue twisters and nonsense scatting and additional material for his 1941 Broadway musical Let's Face It. This carried over when Kaye made his feature film debut in 1944's Up in Arms, writing dialogue and lyrics for the lobby number in which Kaye launches into an extended routine while waiting for a movie to start. She wrote music and lyrics for all of the songs for The Inspector General and for the more intermittently musical Wonder Man, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, and other films. She also wrote novelty songs which Kaye performed on records, such as "Popo the Puppet."

Fine wrote for radio's The Danny Kaye Show (with Abe Burrows and others) and her Court Jester song "Life Could Not Better Be" became Kaye's theme song on television. Apart from the songs for which she was sole writer, she penned lyrics for the slightly more dramatic Five Pennies (a 1960 biopic with Kaye as bandleader Red Nichols) and for single songs in the Kaye-less films Witness for Murder (with Barbara Stanwyck) and The Moon Is Blue (receiving an Oscar-nomination for Best Song). Later, Fine taught college courses on musical comedy at Yale and USC, which led to a trio of PBS specials titled Musical Comedy Tonight, which she produced and hosted. One of Fine's last projects was a book about her life with Kaye, titled Fine and Danny, which went unpublished after her death.

External links

• Jewish Women's Archive biography