Lily Pons Facts for Kids

Quick facts for kids Lily Pons
Lily Pons, ca. 1937
Born	Alice Joséphine Pons (1898-04-12)April 12, 1898 Draguignan, France
Died	February 13, 1976(1976-02-13) (aged 77) Dallas, Texas, U.S.
Resting place	Cimetière du Grand Jas, Cannes
Nationality	France (U.S. after 1940)
Occupation	opera singer, actress
Years active	1920s–1970s
Known for	Metropolitan Opera coloratura soprano
Spouse(s)	August Mesritz (m. 1930; div. 1933) Andre Kostelanetz (m. 1938; div. 1958)

Alice Joséphine Pons (April 12, 1898 – February 13, 1976), known professionally as Lily Pons, was a French-American operatic soprano and actress who had an active career from the late 1920s through the early 1970s. As an opera singer, she specialized in the coloratura soprano repertoire and was particularly associated with the title roles in Lakmé and Lucia di Lammermoor. In addition to appearing as a guest artist with many opera houses internationally, Pons enjoyed a long association with the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, where she performed nearly 300 times between 1931 and 1960.

She also had a successful and lucrative career as a concert singer, which continued until her retirement from performance in 1973. From 1935 to 1937, she made three musical films for RKO Pictures. She also made numerous appearances on radio and on television, performing on variety programs such as The Ed Sullivan Show, The Colgate Comedy Hour, and The Dave Garroway Show. In 1955, she topped the bill for the first broadcast of what became an iconic television series, Sunday Night at the London Palladium. She made dozens of records, recording both classical and popular music. She was awarded the Croix de Lorraine and the Légion d'honneur by the government of France.

Pons was also adept at making herself into a marketable cultural icon. Her opinions on fashion and home decorating were frequently reported in women's magazines, and she appeared as the face for Lockheed airplanes, Knox gelatin, and Libby's tomato juice advertisements. A town in Maryland named itself after her, and thereafter the singer contrived to have all her Christmas cards posted from Lilypons, Maryland. Opera News wrote in 2011, "Pons promoted herself with a kind of marketing savvy that no singer ever had shown before, and very few have since; only Luciano Pavarotti was quite so successful at exploiting the mass media."

Early life and education
Death
Legacies
Recordings
Images for kids
See also

Early life and education

Lily Pons at CKAC, Montreal, 1939

Pons was born in Draguignan near Cannes, to a French father, Léonard Louis Auguste Antoine Pons, and an Italian-born mother, Maria (née Naso), later known as Marie Pétronille Pons. She first studied piano at the Paris Conservatory, winning the first prize at the age of 15. At the onset of World War I in 1914, she moved with her mother and younger sister Juliette (born December 22, 1902 – died 1995) to Cannes, where she played piano and sang for soldiers at receptions given in support of the French troops and at the famous Hotel Carlton that had been transformed into a hospital, and where her mother worked as a volunteer nurse orderly.

In 1925, encouraged by soprano Dyna Beumer [nl] and August Mesritz, a successful publisher who agreed to fund her singing career, she started taking singing lessons in Paris with Alberto de Gorostiaga [es]. She later studied singing with Alice Zeppilli in New York. On October 15, 1930, Pons married her first husband, Mesritz, and spent the next several years as a housewife. The marriage ended in divorce on December 7, 1933.

Death

She died of pancreatic cancer in Dallas, Texas, at the age of 77. Her remains were brought back to her birthplace to be interred in the Cimetière du Grand Jas in Cannes. Her nephew, John de Bry (son of her sister Juliette), an archaeologist living in Florida, is her sole surviving relative in the United States; his sister, Florence de Bry Mini, who lives near Paris is Lily's last direct relative in France.

Legacies

A village in Frederick County, Maryland, 10 miles south of Frederick, Maryland, is called Lilypons in her honor.

George Gershwin was in the process of writing a piece of music dedicated to her when he died in 1937. The incomplete sketch was found among Gershwin's papers after his death and was eventually revived and completed by Michael Tilson Thomas; it was given the simple title, For Lily Pons.

Pons donated Ita, her pet ocelot, to the New York Zoological Gardens when it became too dangerous to remain in her Central Park West apartment. Pons had received the pet, which she believed was a baby jaguar, from a friend in Brazil. The pet and Pons were very attached to each other but it snarled at visitors and was deemed a hazard.

The cartoon The Woods Are Full of Cuckoos caricatures Pons as "Lily Swans".

In Stephen Frears's Florence Foster Jenkins, Pons is played by Aida Garifullina.

Recordings

In the late 1930s she made three movies for RKO. There is a large legacy of recordings, mostly on the RCA Victor and Columbia labels, many of which are available on LP and CD.