David Shire

David Lee Shire, born July 3, 1937, in Buffalo, New York, is an American composer and songwriter whose work spans Broadway musicals, feature films, and television. His father, Irving Daniel Shire, was a Buffalo society band leader and piano teacher, and his mother was Esther Miriam (née Sheinberg). The family was Jewish, and Shire received his secondary education at the Nichols School in Buffalo.

Shire attended Yale University, where he graduated magna cum laude in 1959 with a double major in English and music, earning Phi Beta Kappa honors. At Yale he co-fronted a jazz ensemble called the Shire-Fogg Quintet and was a member of the Pundits and Elihu. It was at Yale that he first collaborated with lyricist and director Richard Maltby Jr., with whom he wrote two musicals, Cyrano and Grand Tour, both produced by the Yale Dramatic Association. Following a semester of graduate study at Brandeis University, where he was the first Eddie Fisher Fellow, and six months of service in the U.S. Army National Guard infantry, Shire settled in New York City. There he worked as a dance class pianist, a theater rehearsal and pit pianist, and a society band musician while continuing to develop musicals with Maltby. Their first off-Broadway collaboration, The Sap of Life, was produced in 1961 at One Sheridan Square Theater in Greenwich Village. In 1963, Shire co-wrote "Washington Square," recorded by The Village Stompers, with Bob Goldstein.

As a pit pianist, Shire played for the original Broadway productions of both The Fantasticks and Funny Girl, and he subsequently served as Barbra Streisand's accompanist for several years. He also intermittently conducted and arranged for Streisand, most notably for her television specials Color Me Barbra and The Belle of Fourteenth Street, and she recorded five of his songs over the course of their working relationship. His Broadway credits as a composer include the 1967 production How Do You Do, I Love You, the 1968 production Love Match, and dance music arrangements for the 1970 production of Company. He also served as rehearsal pianist for Anyone Can Whistle in 1964 and as pit pianist and assistant conductor for Funny Girl that same year.

Shire's two most prominent Broadway composing credits are Baby, which opened in 1983, and Big, which opened in 1996, both created in collaboration with Maltby. Baby earned Tony Award nominations for Best Musical and Best Original Score, while Big received a Tony Award nomination for Best Original Score as well as a Drama Desk Award nomination for Outstanding Music. Both shows have gone on to hundreds of regional and stock productions worldwide. His off-Broadway musical theater work with Maltby includes the revues Starting Here, Starting Now, which received a Grammy nomination for Best Cast Album, and Closer Than Ever, which won the Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Musical. A newer musical, Take Flight, premiered at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London in July 2007 and received a separate production in Tokyo in November 2007, with earlier concert versions performed in Australia and Russia. About Time, conceived as a sequel to Starting Here, Starting Now and Closer Than Ever, premiered in May 2025 at Goodspeed Musicals' Norma Terris Theatre and was subsequently produced at 54 Below in November 2025.

Shire began scoring for television in the 1960s and transitioned to feature film scoring in the early 1970s. His screen credits include Two People, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, The Hindenburg, Farewell My Lovely, All the President's Men, The Big Bus, The Conversation, 2010, Return to Oz, Short Circuit, Max Dugan Returns, and Zodiac. The Conversation, scored in 1974 for director Francis Ford Coppola, is among his most recognized film scores; Shire used a solo piano as the foundation of the score and manipulated taped piano sounds to create distorted sonic textures intended to reflect the isolation and paranoia of the film's protagonist. For The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, he constructed the main title around a jazz-funk groove in a minor key, building melodies and harmonies from atonal twelve-tone rows. He composed original music for Saturday Night Fever, including "Manhattan Skyline," "Salsation," and "Night on Disco Mountain," and received two Grammy Award nominations for his contributions to that project. In 1979 he won the Academy Award for Best Song for "It Goes Like It Goes," written with lyricist Norman Gimbel for the film Norma Rae. That same year he received a second nomination in the same category for "I'll Never Say Goodbye," from The Promise, with lyrics by Marilyn and Alan Bergman. Also in 1979, his song "With You I'm Born Again," recorded by Billy Preston and Syreeta, reached the top five internationally and remained on the pop charts for 26 weeks. His television scoring work has earned five Emmy nominations, and his credits in that medium include Killer Bees, Raid on Entebbe, The Kennedys of Massachusetts, Serving in Silence: The Margarethe Cammermeyer Story, Rear Window, The Women of Brewster Place, and The Heidi Chronicles. He also composed themes for the television series Alice and McCloud and for the 1976–1977 Danny Thomas sitcom The Practice. He wrote and composed songs for the PBS children's series Shining Time Station, which starred his wife, actress Didi Conn, alongside comedian George Carlin.

In June 2008, Shire's one-act opera A Stream of Voices, with a libretto by Gene Scheer, premiered in Denver, performed by the Colorado Children's Chorale. He has conducted numerous orchestras in connection with both film scores and pop concerts, among them the London Symphony Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the San Francisco Opera Orchestra, the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Munich Symphony. Shire serves on the council of the Dramatists Guild of America and is a trustee of both the Rockland Conservatory of Music and the Palisades, New York, Library. He was inducted into the Buffalo Music Hall of Fame in 2006.

From 1970 to 1980, Shire was married to actress Talia Shire, with whom he has one son, screenwriter Matthew Shire. Since 1984 he has been married to actress Didi Conn; their son Daniel, born in October 1992, was diagnosed with autism. Shire's brother, Sanford Shire, was also a conductor, working notably with comedian and impressionist Fred Travalena, and published a book on the paintings of choreographer Antoni Nellé.