Monty Norman, who has died aged 94, was a prolific contributor to British musicals in the 1950s and 60s, working with directors such as Peter Brook and Joan Littlewood.
Among his successes as a composer, lyricist or both were the musicals Expresso Bongo, Irma La Douce and Make Me an Offer. However, his best known and most lucrative composition was the James Bond theme, the brief staccato phrase written for Dr No in 1962 – and included in subsequent films in the James Bond series.
Ian Fleming’s spy novel was mainly set in the Caribbean, and Norman visited Jamaica to find inspiration for his score. The results were not to the taste of Dr No’s director, Terence Young, who called in a younger musician, John Barry, to provide arrangements.
Norman’s James Bond theme, adapted by him from a song composed for an abandoned musical of VS Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas, was recast by Barry and the guitarist Vic Flick in the contemporary, rumbling, twangy way, and reached No 13 in the charts in early 1963.
Because Barry would write music for many later Bond films, the theme was sometimes mistakenly attributed to him – and Norman’s lawyers extracted considerable amounts in damages and costs from the Sunday Times (which ran an article claiming that Norman had wrongly taken credit for the theme) and other publications. Norman’s actual royalty income from the theme was much larger, reportedly reaching more than £600,000 between 1976 and 1999.
The son of Ann (nee Berlyn) and Abraham Noserovitch (anglicised to Norman), he was born in Stepney, east London. For the first few years of his life, the family lived with his Latvian Jewish immigrant grandparents. Monty’s father worked as a cabinetmaker while Ann was a seamstress, making clothes for her sister to sell at local street markets.
It was a musical family – Monty’s uncles and cousins were talented amateur singers – and at 16 he was given a Gibson guitar. After the family had moved to St Albans, Hertfordshire, in the mid-40s, Monty took lessons with Bert Weedon, a leading dance band guitarist and author of several instruction books for the instrument. Weedon advised Norman to concentrate on singing and introduced him to a vocal coach, Laurence Leonard.
He joined various small jazz combos as a vocalist and eventually found employment with several of the leading dance band leaders of the era. He was initially employed by Cyril Stapleton, followed by Stanley Black and Ted Heath. During the mid-50s, Norman appeared at the London Palladium, sang on radio and toured in variety shows with Benny Hill and other comedians.
As a sideline he began to write songs and when one of these, False Hearted Lover, became a minor success, he decided to focus on composing rather than performing. After meeting the writer Wolf Mankowitz in 1958, Norman teamed up with David Heneker and Julian More to create Expresso Bongo, a satire on the emerging pop music scene based on a story by Mankowitz. Starring Paul Scofield and Millicent Martin, Expresso Bongo ran in the West End for a year before becoming a 1959 film starring Cliff Richard. Norman’s next show was Irma La Douce, a version of a French hit show, directed by Brook with English lyrics by Norman, More and Heneker.
By now, Norman had made a reputation as a composer for verismo productions, the musical equivalent of the kitchen sink dramas of John Osborne, Arnold Wesker and others. His next show was commissioned for her Theatre Workshop company and directed by Littlewood . Opening in 1959, Make Me an Offer, again based on a story by Mankowitz, was set among the antiques street markets of Notting Hill, with the singalong number Portobello Road as its highlight.
Mankowitz and Norman entered more controversial territory with Belle or the Ballad of Dr Crippen. Based on a notorious murder case and using the conventions of Edwardian music hall, it was condemned by the press as “a sick joke with music”. The show closed after only six weeks – but one of its backers was impressed enough to offer Norman work on a film he was producing. The backer was Albert “Cubby” Broccoli and the film was Dr No.
After Dr No, Norman returned to the stage. His later shows included The Perils of Scobie Prilt (1963), the Yiddish show Pinkus (1967), Stand and Deliver (1972), So Who Needs Marriage? (1975), Songbook (1979), which starred Bob Hoskins, and Poppy, written with the playwright Peter Nichols and staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1982. Although these were not major hits, Norman has been credited by the theatre historian Adrian Wright as the creator of “some of the most interesting and provocative scores in British musicals”.
Norman also wrote music for the films The Two Faces of Dr Jekyll (1960), The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961), and the Bob Hope comedy Call Me Bwana (1962), as well as television series such as Dickens of London (1976).
His work won the Ivor Novello songwriting award, Evening Standard and Olivier awards for West End theatre and a Tony nomination for best Broadway musical.
Norman was married first to the actor Diana Coupland, with whom he had a daughter; the marriage ended in divorce. He later married his second wife, Rina Caesari.
• Monty Norman (Noserovitch), composer, born 4 April 1928; died 11 July 2022
• Dave Laing died in 2019
