William Blezard

William Blezard, was best known as piano accompanist for such leading stage figures as Joyce Grenfell, Marlene Dietrich and Honor Blackman. He was also a composer of note, particularly of theatre and film music. Born in Padiham, near Burnley, he was the son of mill workers, and his tenor father sang semi-professionally. William showed talent, initially on the harmonium, and subsequently on the piano, which he played in the local cinema. A mill owner, Teddy Higham, paid for William to have piano lessons until, in 1938, he won a Lancashire County scholarship, leaving Clitheroe Royal grammar school, where he had already performed Gershwin's Rhapsody In Blue, to go to the Royal College of Music (RCM) in London. His studies were interrupted in 1940 by war service in the RAF as a Morse code operator in Wick, but he soon found access to a piano and continued to study and compose. On his return to the RCM in 1946, he studied piano with Arthur Benjamin and Frank Merrick, composition with Herbert Howells, and orchestration with Gordon Jacobs. He won the prestigious Cobbett Prize, for Fantasy String Quartet. This resulted in Muir Mathieson inviting him to work at Denham Studios as a composer and arranger for documentaries. He arranged and orchestrated Noël Coward's music for the film of his play The Astonished Heart (1949). Through his wife-to-be, the conductor and teacher Joan Kemp Potter, William met the pianist Donald Swann, and it was through Swann that he met Joyce Grenfell. His participation in Joyce Grenfell Requests The Pleasure started in 1954, and he remained her accompanist throughout her career, including several BBC broadcasts, four world tours and her last performance, for the royal family at Windsor Castle in June 1973. William contributed, with relish, The Battle March Of Delhi, a Victorian parlour song. As composer and musical director, William had an illustrious career in the theatre. In 1957, he worked on two Royal Shakespeare Company productions with Peter Brook, Titus Andronicus and The Tempest. In the same year, he became musical director of John Osborne's The Entertainer, with Laurence Olivier as the failed music-hall artist Archie Rice. William fulfilled the same role for the Max Wall revival in 1974, and this led to William's involvement in the solo show Aspects Of Max Wall. In 1965, William took over from Burt Bacharach as Marlene Dietrich's accompanist and musical director. With typical modesty, William always maintained that he landed the job because he had the correct zodiac sign. They gave three world tours, ending in 1975 when Dietrich broke her leg on stage in Sydney - it was her final performance. William was also musical director for the show that Sheridan Morley wrote and narrated about Coward and Gertrude Lawrence, Noël And Gertie, and worked with Joanna Lumley, Ian Ogilvy, Patricia Hodge and Maria Aitken. In the 1980s, he started a long-running partnership with Honor Blackman, in her one-woman shows, Yvette and Dishonourable Ladies. In 1990, he played for the first of many performances of Tim Heath's Not Yet The Dodo, based on Coward's poem. His gifts as an improviser were on display in the BBC television children's programme Play School from 1964 onwards. Often he was called on to provide, at the drop of a hat, what presenter Johnny Ball called "onomatopoeic music", music to evoke running water or splashing in puddles. In later life, William was gratified to see several of his works performed. The Royal Ballet Sinfonia recorded his Battersea Park Suite, Caramba, The River and Duetto For Strings; the oboist Jill Crowther and the English Northern Philharmonia his Two Celtic Pieces; and Eric Parkin two CDs of his piano music. He was a Francophile who admired the music of Ravel, echoes of which can be heard in his own; he liked travelling abroad in general, and had an aptitude for languages. Paradoxically, away from the piano, he was renowned for being clumsy and spatially unaware. He considered that inanimate objects conspired against him, and would often greet me at the door with a glum pronouncement of that day's score, "Inanimate objects three - Blezard nil." Right up until his death William was performing, and could be seen bicycling around Barnes. His wife predeceased him in 2001, and he was survived by his son Paul and daughter Pookie.