LEST WE FORGET DOROTHY FIELDS
    (July 15, 1905-March 28, 1974)

    The first female lyricist to receive an Oscar (1936), a Tony Award (1959) and membership in the Songwriters Hall of Fame (1971)

 A lyricist, librettist, and screenwriter, Dorothy Fields was born in Allenhurst, New Jersey. She was the youngest child of Lewis Maurice Schoenfeld, better known as Lew Fields, a vaudeville comic, (Weber and Fields) and producer.  He was opposed to show business careers for his four children.

In the early 1920s, encouraged by her playwright-brothers Joseph and Herbert, her ambition was to become an actress.  Due to her father's intervention, she began to write poetry and was persuaded by composer J. Fred Coots to become a lyricist.  While on the staff at Mills Music Company, she began an eight-year collaboration with Jimmy McHugh.

The two achieved success in 1927 with material they devised for black performers at Harlem's famous Cotton Club. The team's first Broadway score was the revue Blackbirds of 1928.
Among the popular songs to emerge from this venture were "Diga-Diga-Doo" and "I Can't Give You Anything But Love," both of which revealed Fields's ability to approximate common speech patterns to lyrics.  In 1930 the
International Revue included her songs "Exactly Like You" and "On the Sunny Side of the Street" sung by
Gertrude Lawrence and Harry Richman.

Between 1932 and 1938 she worked primarily in Hollywood, writing memorable lyrics for largely forgettable screen musicals. She and McHugh produced "Don't Blame Me," "I Feel a Song Comin' On," and "I'm in the Mood for Love."
Other Hollywood collaborators included Nacio Herb Brown,
Max Steiner, and most notably, Jerome Kern.

She wrote songs with Kern for the films Roberta (1935), Joy of Living (1938), for which she co-authored the screenplay, and Swing Time (1936), "The Way You Look Tonight," from Swing Time, won for her the 1936 Oscar for best song from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts.
     Her second partnership was with Arthur Schwartz to create the score for Stars In Your Eyes in 1939.  In 1941 she entered another career in the theatre by joining her brother Herbert as co-librettist for eight musicals.  Their earliest collaborations were libretti devised around the songs of other composers. 
Let's Face It! (1941), Something for the Boys (1943), and Mexican Hayride (1944) featured songs by
Cole Porter, while the musical comedy Annie Get Your Gun (1946) had a score by Irving Berlin.
     Teaming again with Arthur Schwartz in the 1950s, she wrote songs for A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,
By the Beautiful Sea,  which were both tailored for the talents of Shirley Booth.  Then followed the songs for Redhead with Albert Hague and Sweet Charity with Cy Coleman, designed expressly for
Gwen Verdon. Her last musical, Seesaw (1973) reunited her with Cy Coleman.

When she died in 1974 she left unfinished a number of projects, as well as a legacy that includes scores for thirteen Broadway shows and over five hundred songs written for films and television.



Resource:  Notable Women in the American Theatre. 1989  Dwight B. Bowers