Biography
Cole Porter was born in the US – in Peru, Indiana – in 1891. The son of wealthy parents, he started playing piano and violin when he was six years old. By the age of 10, he had started composing music. He went to the universities of Yale and then Harvard, where he started as a law student but soon opted to study music. After the First World War he moved to Paris, where he studied music and began to mix with the writers, artists and intellectuals of the Left Bank. While there, Porter met and married Linda Lee Thomas, despite the fact that she was aware that he was gay. Their palatial home in Paris became the backdrop for many spectacular and lavish parties, attended by the leading socialites of the day.
In 1923, in what he described as 'my one effort to be respectable', Porter wrote the music for a modern ballet called Within the Quota, which was full of jazz rhythms and harmonies. But classical music was not to be his future. Bringing together complex classical techniques with the rhythms and harmonies of popular music and adding brilliant lyrics, Porter's sophisticated popular music would fill the vacuum left by modernist classical composers who had lost touch with their audiences.
Towards the end of the 1920s Cole Porter started to make his name on Broadway, enjoying a reputation for his witty, suave and often provocative style. Despite the economic slump, by the 1930s Porter boasted a string of hit shows. Throughout the decade, seven Cole Porter musicals were staged on Broadway, while he also composed scores for several Hollywood musicals.
In 1937 Porter was involved in a horrific horse-riding accident, in which he fractured both legs. Though the pain from those injuries remained with him for the rest of his life, he continued to compose. Night and Day, the fictionalised film version of Porter's life was released in 1946 and, in 1948, he enjoyed great success with Kiss Me, Kate, his musical based on Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew.
After having a leg amputated in 1958, Porter became a recluse. Two years later, Yale honoured him with an honorary doctorate. He died in Hollywood 1964.
