Author: Mike Barnes / Source: The Hollywood Reporter
He wrote “Killing Me Softly With His Song” and “I Got a Name,” hits for Roberta Flack and Jim Croce, respectively, words to “The Girl From Ipanema” and the theme to ‘Happy Days.’
Norman Gimbel, the Oscar- and Grammy-winning lyricist whose career included Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” Jim Croce’s “I Got a Name” and the themes to Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley, has died. He was 91.
Gimbel died Dec. 19 at his longtime home in Montecito, Calif.
, son Tony Gimbel told The Hollywood Reporter.The Brooklyn native shared his original song Academy Award with David Shire for “It Goes Like It Goes,” performed by Jennifer Warnes for Norma Rae (1979), starring Sally Field in an Oscar-winning turn.
With music by his most frequent writing partner, Charles Fox, Gimbel wrote the lyrics to the wonderfully melancholy “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” and Flack’s version earned them the Grammy for Song of the Year in 1973. (The song, which spent five weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, was first recorded by Lori Lieberman a couple years earlier, and the Fugees’ hip-hop cover version was a hit decades later.)
Gimbel and Fox also collaborated on Croce’s “I Got a Name,” released the day after the singer’s death in a plane crash Sept. 20, 1973. The song served as the theme to The Last American Hero (1973), starring Jeff Bridges.
“I’ve always felt that lyric was among the very best from Norman’s pen,” Fox wrote in his 2010 biography, Killing Me Softly: My Life in Music. He noted that he and Gimbel had written more than 150 songs together over 30 years.
“Norman’s lyrics have extraordinary beauty and sensitivity and understanding of the human condition,” Fox wrote.
“There’s never a waste or [an] excessive word.”The duo also earned original song Oscar noms for writing “Richard’s Window,” performed by Olivia Newton-John for The Other Side of the Mountain (1975), and “Ready to Take a Chance Again,” sung by Barry Manilow for Foul Play (1978).
Gimbel and Fox…
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