DORY PREVIN:THE SINGER-SONGWRITER Dory Previn, who has died aged 86, gained a significant following in the 1970s with her dark and honest view of life that drew on a troubled childhood, marriage difficulties and periods of mental illness. By then she had gained three Oscar nominations for lyrics – early signs of recognition in a career that soon took her on quite a different path.
Her start in Hollywood came in 1955, out of the MGM producer Arthur Freed's interest in her work. Initially she provided lyrics for André Previn, then much-occupied with movie scores. At first they collaborated at a distance, but once they had met, they made a jazz album together, The Leprechauns Are Upon Me(1958). In 1959 they married, Dory's earlier marriage having ended in divorce.
She always made it clear that throughout the rollercoaster course of her mental fragility in the 1960s, which was punctuated by spells in hospital, André was forever supportive, merrily playing piano for everybody in the sanatorium to which her escalating troubles brought her: “I don’t know how he stayed so long,” she recalled. “He left me for another woman after I had left him for another reality.”
André went to live with the young actor Mia Farrow, who had been a visitor to the Previns’ house.
In 1970 she re-emerged, with big glasses and even bigger hair, with her first solo album, On My Way to Where,referring to a breakdown she had had while waiting for an aircraft to take off.
In its most famous track, Beware of Young Girls, which Farrow at first thought tasteless but later appreciated, Dory wrote of a visitor who came bearing daisies: "She was my friend/ I thought her motives were sincere . . . / Ah but this lass / It came to pass / Had / A dark and different plan/ She admired/ My own sweet man." She noted that this visitor "admired my unmade bed", and even predicted that, having made off with the sweet man, "she will leave him one thoughtless day".
More LPs swiftly followed: Mythical Kings and Iguanas, Reflections in a Mud Puddle(both 1971) and Mary C Brown and the Hollywood Sign(1972), originally an unproduced stage show.
Dory Previn was born Dorothy Langan into an Irish Catholic family in Woodbridge, New Jersey. She and her alcoholic mother were locked in the dining room for several months by a father who had suffered from psychological difficulties after he was gassed in the first World War.
She left school at 16. Despite “my pug-Irish features and my stumpy legs”, she studied acting in New York, but, hard-up, left after a year and found work as a model, dancer, actor, folk singer, secretary and babysitter. At 17, she fell in love and ended up in California, pregnant. After an abortion, she earned the bus fare east as a hat-check girl. Her first marriage again led to pregnancy, abandonment and an abortion.
In 1986, she married the actor and painter Joby Baker, who survives her. Her renewed friendship with André Previn bore fruit in The Magic Number(1997).
Dory (Dorothy Veronica) Previn (née Langan): born October 22nd, 1925; died February 14th, 2012