Not to be confused with the Editor-in-Chief of Variety

Variety (magazine)

Variety is an American weekly entertainment-trade magazine founded in New York City, New York, in 1905 by Sime Silverman. With the rise of the importance of the motion-picture industry, Daily Variety, a daily edition based in Los Angeles, California, was founded by Silverman in 1933. In 1998, the...

 Timothy M. Gray, or American football

American football

American football is a sport played between two teams of eleven with the objective of scoring points by advancing the ball into the opposing team's end zone. Known in the United States simply as football, it may also be referred to informally as gridiron football. The ball can be advanced by...

 player Tim Gray

Tim Gray

Tim Gray is a former American football safety in the National Football League. He was drafted by the St. Louis Cardinals 21st overall in the 1975 NFL Draft. He played college football at Texas A&M....

.

Timothy Gray (September 5, 1926 — March 17, 2007) was an American songwriter, author, singer and director, remembered for his partnership with Hugh Martin

Hugh Martin

Hugh Martin was an American musical theater and film composer, arranger, vocal coach, and playwright. He is best known for his score for the 1944 MGM musical Meet Me In St...

 which produced High Spirits

High Spirits (musical)

High Spirits is a musical with a book, lyrics, and music by Hugh Martin and Timothy Gray, based on the play Blithe Spirit by Noël Coward, about a man's problems caused by the spirit of his dead wife....

, a musical based on Noel Coward

Noël Coward

Sir Noël Peirce Coward was an English playwright, composer, director, actor and singer, known for his wit, flamboyance, and what Time magazine called "a sense of personal style, a combination of cheek and chic, pose and poise".Born in Teddington, a suburb of London, Coward attended a dance academy...

's play, Blithe Spirit

Blithe Spirit (play)

Blithe Spirit is a comic play written by Noël Coward which takes its title from Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem "To a Skylark" . The play concerns socialite and novelist Charles Condomine, who invites the eccentric medium and clairvoyant, Madame Arcati, to his house to conduct a séance, hoping to...

.

Biography

Gray, whose birth name was John Baker Gray, was born in Chicago and became a performer in vaudeville

Vaudeville

Vaudeville was a theatrical genre of variety entertainment in the United States and Canada from the early 1880s until the early 1930s. Each performance was made up of a series of separate, unrelated acts grouped together on a common bill...

 at the age of 16. He later performed on Broadway

Broadway theatre

Broadway theatre, commonly called simply Broadway, refers to theatrical performances presented in one of the 40 professional theatres with 500 or more seats located in the Theatre District centered along Broadway, and in Lincoln Center, in Manhattan in New York City...

 in musicals

Musical theatre

Musical theatre is a form of theatre combining songs, spoken dialogue, acting, and dance. The emotional content of the piece – humor, pathos, love, anger – as well as the story itself, is communicated through the words, music, movement and technical aspects of the entertainment as an...

, including As the Girls Go

As the Girls Go

As the Girls Go is a musical with music by Jimmy McHugh, lyrics by Harold Adamson and a book by William Roos.After an out-of-town tryout at the Opera House in Boston in October 1948, the original Broadway production of As the Girls Go opened at the Winter Garden Theatre on November 13, 1948,...

, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (musical)

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is a musical with a book by Joseph Fields and Anita Loos, lyrics by Leo Robin, and music by Jule Styne, based on the best-selling novel of the same name by Loos...

, and then television, before becoming a writer and composer.

He composed the songs for the Broadway musical Make a Wish. He also wrote the score of the London show Love From Judy and collaborated on High Spirits

High Spirits

High Spirits may refer to:* High Spirits , a Broadway production based on the Noel Coward play Blithe Spirit* High Spirits , a comedy starring Peter O'Toole* High Spirits , a book by Robertson Davies...

with Hugh Martin

Hugh Martin

Hugh Martin was an American musical theater and film composer, arranger, vocal coach, and playwright. He is best known for his score for the 1944 MGM musical Meet Me In St...

. Songs that he composed included "Forever and a Day", "Go and Get Your Old Banjo", "Was She Prettier Than I?", "Home Sweet Heaven", "You'd Better Love Me" and "If I Gave You".

For his work on High Spirits, he was nominated for Tony Awards for Best Author (Musical), Best Composer and Lyricist, and Best Musical. His other Broadway credits were Good News

Good News (musical)

Good News is a musical with a book by Laurence Schwab and B.G. DeSylva, lyrics by DeSylva and Lew Brown, and music by Ray Henderson.The show opened on Broadway in 1927, the same year as Show Boat, but its plot was decidedly old-fashioned in comparison to Show Boats somewhat tragic and daring...

(1971) as vocal arranger, and the 1974 revival of Johnny Johnson

Johnny Johnson (musical)

Johnny Johnson is a musical with a book and lyrics by Paul Green and music by Kurt Weill.Based on Jaroslav Hašek's satiric novel The Good Soldier Švejk, it focuses on a naive and idealistic young man who, despite his pacifist views, leaves his sweetheart Minny Belle Tompkins to fight in Europe in...

, as producer.