Fran Landesman

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Fran Landesman (b. 1927) is an American lyricist and poet.

Landesman was born Frances Deitsch on October 21, 1927 in New York City. Her father was a dress manufacturer, her mother was a journalist; she has one brother, Sam.

She was educated at private schools, then at Temple University, Philadelphia, and finally at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. Her first career was in the fashion industry in New York, where she met writer Jay Landesman, whom she married in July 15, 1950, and with whom she had two sons, Cosmo Landesman and Miles Davis Landesman.

They moved to her husband's home of St Louis, where he and his brother started up the Crystal Palace, a cabaret. This was a successful venture, attracting big-name acts as well as producing avant-garde theatre. Fran Landesman's experiences sitting in the bar of the Crystal Palace, listening to musicians and audiences, led her to begin writing song lyrics in 1952, including one of her best-known: “Spring can really hang you up the most”. The Palace's pianist, Tommy Wolf, set this to music, and it became a hit, leading to more Landesman–Wolf creations, including the songs for The Nervous Set (a Broadway musical by Landesman's husband) and Molly Darling (a musical by her husband and Martin Quigley).

In 1964 the Landesmans moved to London, where Fran wrote lyrics for a number of well-known musicians (with an emphasis on jazz), as well as for another of her husband's musicals, Dearest Dracula. She also started writing poetry, for which she has become even better known than for her lyrics (though there, is of course, much overlap between the two). In 1996 the BBC received a number of complaints when Landesman appeared on Desert Island Discs, and requested a supply of marijuana as her luxury item.