Anne Caldwell

Anne Marsh Caldwell (August 30, 1867 – October 22, 1936), also known as Anne Caldwell O'Dea, was an American playwright, lyricist, and composer born in Boston, Massachusetts. She began her professional life at the Juvenile Opera Company and became one of only four female songwriters working in the field during the early 1900s. Her Broadway credits as composer and book writer include Chin Chin, The City, The Bunch and Judy, Criss Cross, and Go to It, among numerous other productions. In 1970, she was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

Caldwell was a charter member of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, and her output between 1907 and 1928 centered primarily on Broadway scores. From 1900 through the mid-1920s, she collaborated frequently with composer Jerome Kern. Their first joint project was the musical She's a Good Fellow, followed by The Night Boat in 1920 and Sally that same year. The Night Boat was among the more successful productions she and Kern produced together.

In 1929, producer William LeBaron brought Caldwell to Hollywood, where she worked as a script doctor and wrote lyrics for RKO Pictures. She was engaged by Max Hart to write songs alongside Harry Tierney, and by October of that year she had signed on to provide lyrics for the film Dixiana. Her final credited work was a radio adaptation of the 1933 film Flying Down to Rio, on which she had also worked in its original screen form.

Caldwell's personal life included two marriages. She wed William L. Vinal on August 2, 1885, in Manhattan, and the couple had a daughter, Marianna Sarah Vinal, known as Molly, born in 1886. William Vinal died on March 4, 1897, in a gas explosion at the Boylston station of the Tremont Street Subway in Boston. Caldwell subsequently married lyricist James J. O'Dea on August 15, 1904, in Brooklyn. She died in Beverly Hills, California, following a short illness, with her son Anthony Patrick O'Day and her daughter Molly at her side.

Alongside Rida Johnson Young and Dorothy Donnelly, Caldwell was part of a generation of women who helped establish that female writers could produce work for the American musical stage on equal footing with their male counterparts. Following her death, Variety described her as one of the most prolific librettists in show business, noting that she worked as both book writer and lyricist and had developed a technique that rarely failed.