British composer, playwright, and lyricist.
His original name was Lionel Begleiter.
He was the youngest of seven surviving children of a Jewish family in the East End of London. His father worked as a tailor in a garden shed in London E1. The family had escaped the pogroms in Galicia which was then part of the Austrian Empire.
When Lionel Bart was six a teacher told his parents that he was a musical genius. His parents gave him an old violin, but he did not apply himself and the lessons stopped.
At the age of 16 he obtained a scholarship to St Martin's School of Art but he was expelled for "mischievousness", and he gave up his ambition to be a painter. However, he took jobs in silk-screen printing works and commercial art studios.
He entered National Service in the Royal Air Force.
He borrowed £50 and set up a printing business in Hackney with John Gorman who he had met in the RAF. Black and white photographs of them in 1950 at their workshop at 53 Elderfield Road, Hackney are reproduced in John Gorman's autobiography.
He joined the Communist Party. He arranged a cabaret for the left-leaning International Youth Centre. In 1952 he wrote, with John Gold, the annual IYC review with a story about Robin Hood. For the leftist Unity Theatre he wrote the lyrics for an agit-prop version of Cinderella.
After seeing St Bartholomew's hospital ("Barts") when passing by on a bus he changed his name to Bart.
His work included writing comedy songs for the Sunday lunchtime BBC radio programme the Billy Cotton Band Show.
In September 1956 he saw Tommy Hicks performing guitar in a Soho coffee bar. He signed him up to perform in a group called the Cavemen. Lionel Bart persuaded John Kennedy and Larry Parnes to see Tommy Hicks perform. They were impressed and they signed him up and he adopted the stage name Tommy Steele.
Lionel Bart won three Ivor Novello Awards in 1957, four in 1959, and two in 1960. In 1960 he was given the Variety Club Silver Heart for Show Business Personality of the Year.
Lionel Bart's greatest success was the musical Oliver!. It opened at the New Theatre (later to become the Albery Theatre) on 30th. June, 1960 and received 23 curtain calls. It ran for 2618 performances in London. It opened on Broadway in 1963 and ran there for 774 performances. The 1968 film version, directed by Carol Reed, won several Oscars, including Best Picture.
His friends included Noël Coward, Brian Epstein, Judy Garland, Alma Cogan, and Shirley Bassey. He spent weekends in Mustique with Princess Margaret.
The musical Twang!! in 1965 was a flop but he tried to prop up its failing finances with his own money. He sold the rights to his past and future works, including those of Oliver! to keep himself solvent but he still ended up declaring himself bankrupt in 1972. This led to a decade drinking in his flat in Acton. He was banned from driving in 1975 for driving under the influence of drink, and he was banned again in 1983 for two years.
His old friend John Gorman reappeared to help Lionel Bart sort out his life. He joined Alcoholics Anonymous and gave up drinking. He also took his diabetes more seriously.
He gained attention again in the 1980s with a new version of Livin' Doll with satirical words.
In 1986 he received a special Ivor Novello Award for his life's achievement.
Cameron Mackintosh, who owned half the rights to Oliver! revived the musical at the London Palladium in 1994 in a version rewritten by Lionel Bart. Cameron Mackintosh gave Lionel Bart a share of the production royalties.
He died of cancer, aged 68.
"The roots of his lasting friendship with Lionel Begleiter, the Jewish lad from Stepney, who was to achieve world fame as the lyricist and composer, Lionel Bart, is told for the first time. From the moment of their first meeting in 1948, and their national service in the RAF, Gorman traces the formative years when they worked together, struggling to build a successful design and screen printing company."
"However, it was his lyrics, score and book for Oliver!, based on Charles Dickens's novel, in 1960 that achieved the seemingly impossible: an internationally successful British musical that paved the way for many modern West End shows with their rock undertones."
"I introduced myself. He had known my mother pretty well, first in the East End, where he lived behind the London Hospital when he was still Lionel Begleiter, then at St Martin's School of Art, where they'd both been as teenagers, and lastly in the forties and fifties and at the old Unity Theatre where Bart had written a number of leftish anthems."
"But yes, of course he remembered mum: would I join him for a drink? The drink became a couple, then a meal, and then an invitation to meet again. I met him a couple of days later with an idea: at the time the West End was full of musicals. How would it be if he and I went to see all of them and then I wrote a piece in which our greatest living librettist gave a critique of the modern musical scene? Bart couldn't have been keener, and to celebrate took me to dinner in Kensington, where I just remember getting horribly drunk with Francis Bacon and not much more."