Jule Styne attended Chicago Musical College, but before then he had already attracted attention of another teenager, Mike Todd, later a successful film producer, who commissioned him to write a song for a musical act that he was creating. It was the first of over 1,500 published songs Styne composed in his career. In 1929, Styne was playing with the Ben Pollack band, and wrote the song Sunday. Styne was a vocal coach for 20th Century Fox, until Darryl F. Zanuck fired him because vocal coaching was “a luxury, and we’re cutting out those luxuries” and told him he should write songs, because “that’s forever”. Styne established his own dance band, which brought him to the notice of Hollywood, where he was championed by Frank Sinatra and where he began a collaboration with lyricist Sammy Cahn, with whom he wrote many songs for the movies, including “It’s Been a Long, Long Time” (#1 for 3 weeks for Harry James and His Orchestra in 1945), “Five Minutes More,” and the Oscar-winning title song of Three Coins in the Fountain. He collaborated on the score for the 1955 musical film My Sister Eileen with Leo Robin. Ten of his songs were nominated for the Oscar, many written with Cahn, including “I’ve Heard That Song Before” (#1 for 13 weeks for Harry James and His Orchestra in 1943), “I’ll Walk Alone”, “It’s Magic” (a #2 hit for Doris Day in 1948) and “I Fall in Love Too Easily”.

In 1947, Jule Styne wrote his first score for a Broadway musical, High Button Shoes with Cahn, and over the next several decades wrote the scores for many Broadway shows, most notably Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Peter Pan (additional music), Bells Are Ringing, Gypsy, Do Re Mi, Funny Girl, Sugar (with a story based on the movie Some Like It Hot, but all new music), and the Tony-winning Hallelujah, Baby!. Styne wrote original music for the short-lived, themed amusement park Freedomland U.S.A. which opened on June 19, 1960. His collaborators included Sammy Cahn, Leo Robin, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, Stephen Sondheim, and Bob Merrill. He was the subject of This Is Your Life for British television in 1978 when he was surprised by Eamonn Andrews in New York’s Time Square. Jule Styne died of heart failure in New York City at the age of 88.