The Handsomest Man in Britain, a 2002 BBC documentary describes Ivor Novello as a heartthrob, playwright, film star, composer, and the king of the West End musical. The opening scenes show Novello’s funeral procession in 1951, the streets thronged with mourners all the way to the crematorium at Golder’s Green, the voiceover speculating that the crowds were possibly greater than at the wedding of Prince Charles and Princess Diana.

Before he became a matinee idol, Novello started his career as a musician in Cardiff, Wales where he was born as David Ivor Davies in 1893. His mother was a well-known music teacher and choral conductor and encouraged his musical talent. Novello published his first song at age 15. He went to Magdalen College, Oxford on a scholarship as a chorister, and moved in with his mother in London at age 16, in a flat above the Strand Theatre in which he lived all his life. The fledgling composer worked as a piano teacher until his first success in 1914 with the song “Keep the Home Fires Burning,” an anthem of WWI. By then he had changed his name, taking his mother’s maiden name for his surname. By this time he was contributing songs to various West End musicals, most prominently in the 1917 Theodore and Co. with Jerome Kern.

A brief stint in the Royal Naval Air Service followed. In 1919 at the age of 26, Novello made his film debut in Swiss director Louis Mercanton’s silent film The Call of the Blood. Mercanton cast him based on a photograph – he had “a classic profile that gained him matinee idol status amongst the film-going public,” according to the Encyclopedia of Popular Music. The melodrama of violence, jealousy and unrequited love required Novello, referred to as ‘the embodiment of youth,’ to be flung off a cliff in the Sicily-set story. It was not a great success but Novello caught the public eye and Mercanton cast him in a second film. More film roles followed, but it was the 1922 film The Bohemian Girl with Gladys Cooper that made him a star. Novello also continued appearing on stage, one notable role being the lead in the first London production of Ferenc Molnar’s Liliom in 1926 on which the musical Carousel is based.

When director D.W. Griffith offered him a seven-film contract, Novello moved to Hollywood, and his first film with Griffith, 1923’s The White Rose was acclaimed. At that time, Rudolf Valentino and Ramon Novarro were the box office stars of Hollywood, and Novello, with his good looks and smoldering screen persona, fit right into the type of actor the fans adored. He had to return to London when his contract was canceled by Griffith who was at the end of his career.

But Novello’s biggest film triumphs were ahead of him, namely The Rat (1924), The Triumph of the Rat (1926), and The Return of the Rat (1928), based on a play he had co-written with Constance Collier about a French criminal called Pierre Boucheron. On the heels of the first film, Novello signed with Gainsborough Pictures to take the title role in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog, based on Marie Belloc Lowndes’ popular novel about the Jack the Ripper killings. Novello’s popularity was so great that the famous director had to change the ending of the screenplay so as not to infuriate fans by making their idol a serial killer. The film was released in 1927 and Novello star rose further.

He reunited with Hitchcock on his next project Downhill, another film based on a Novello play, but that film did not do as well.

His first talkie in 1930, Symphony in Two Flats transferred to Broadway as a play with Novello traveling to New York to play the lead. After a production of his musical, The Truth Game was a success, Hollywood took notice and Novello was signed to a 2-year contract by MGM. The Truth Game was turned into a film with Novello writing the screenplay, but he was not cast in the role he created. Hollywood did not seem to know what to do with a ‘too English’ young man whose only standout contribution in his time there was to work on the screenplay for Tarzan, the Ape Man where the words “Me Tarzan, you Jane” were attributed to him. He is quoted by the Guardian as saying, “I never wrote such rubbish in my life,” and calling his time in Hollywood his ‘greatest failure.’ “I came away knowing that obscurity and I were bad companions.”

Having broken his contract and returned to the UK, Novello made a few more movies like Sleeping Car (1933), I Lived with You (1933) and Autumn Crocus (1934) before turning his attention to the stage for the last two decades of his life. A talkie version of The Lodger in 1932 with Novello reprising his role underwhelmed.

Novello’s eight-stage musicals for which he wrote the book and music with libretti by his frequent collaborator Christopher Hassall, were spectacular. They had tens of chorus girls, elaborate staging for shipwrecks and horse-drawn carriages, and sparkling songs. Most were set in the ‘Ruritanian’ kingdom of Krasnia. He played the lead role in six of them, but surprisingly, never sang. The plots were thin but appealed to the wartime audiences who made them hits despite negative reviews criticizing their sentimentality and sappiness. His first bonafide hit was in 1935 with Glamorous Night, a show which revived the fortunes of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. He also performed in straight plays like Shakespeare’s Henry V in 1938 and Love from a Stranger in 1944.

Novello was gay, a fact he never sought to hide in his own theatrical circles, which included Noel Coward and Cecil Beaton, and he had a reputation as being sexually promiscuous. But audiences were unaware, a naivete that seems incredible in today’s times, though critics often referred to him as ‘effeminate’ and ‘pretty.’ His longtime partner, actor Bobbie Andrews, was with him until the end of his life.

In 1943, Novello was thrown in Wormwood Scrubs jail by a homophobic judge for illegally obtaining petrol vouchers at a time when such vouchers were rationed so he could drive his red Rolls Royce from London to his country home Redroofs every weekend. He was released in a month but never recovered from the experience. Even though he returned to the stage to rapturous applause with The Dancing Years and continued performing for the next few years battling depression, he died in 1951 at the age of 58 of a coronary thrombosis, four hours after the curtain fell on King’s Rhapsody, his last performance.

The annual Ivor Novello Awards have been established in the UK since 1956 for songwriters and publishers; past honorees are Elton John, Sting and Paul McCartney. A bronze bust of him is in place in front of the Drury Lane Theatre, a panel commemorating him is in the actors’ church, St Paul’s, Covent Garden, and a memorial stone in St. Paul’s cathedral (where his ashes lie in the crypt) to mark his 21^st death anniversary in 1972. The Strand Theatre above which Novello lived all his life in London was renamed the Novello in 2005. In 2009, a statue of Novello was erected in Cardiff outside the Wales Millennium Center, funded by a public campaign that raised £80,000.

Novello was played by Jeremy Northam in Robert Altman’s 2001 Gosford Park. Some of his songs are part of the film’s soundtrack.