Arthur Wimperis

Arthur Harold Wimperis (3 December 1874 – 14 October 1953) was an English illustrator, playwright, lyricist and Academy Award-winning screenwriter.

Early in his career, Wimperis was an illustrator. For 25 years beginning in 1906, he became a librettist and lyricist for musical comedies, including the hit The Arcadians in 1909 and many other musicals. Beginning in 1930, he moved into writing screenplays for British films, and later Hollywood films, contributing to dozens of screenplays.

Wimperis was born in London, the son of Edmund Morison Wimperis and Anne Harry Edmonds. Educated at Dulwich College and University College London, he began a career as an illustrator on the Daily Graphic. This was soon interrupted by service in the Second Boer War from 1899 to 1902 with Paget's Horse.

Wimperis then began a theatre writing career as a lyricist and librettist for Edwardian musical comedies in London. His first major show was The Dairymaids (1906), which was favourably reviewed by The Times, though the derivative nature of the plot was noted, as was the similarity between the lyrics for the song "Mary in the Dairy" and an earlier Punch magazine parody of a musical comedy number which contained the words, "Mary, Mary, managed a dairy". This similarity was attributed to the paucity of rhymes for Mary, rather than deliberate plagiarism. The show was followed by The Gay Gordons written with Seymour Hicks in 1907. He next contributed songs (including "The Pipes of Pan", "I've Got a Motter", "Arcady Is Always Young", and "Half Past Two") for one of the most popular musicals of the Edwardian age, The Arcadians (1909), as well as to the short-lived The Mountaineers. In addition to contributing lyrics or dialogue to other shows, he then began adapting Viennese operettas into English. The best-known of these are The Balkan Princess (1910) and The Girl in the Taxi (Die keusche Susanne; 1912). He also wrote for The Sunshine Girl (1912). Wimperis also wrote lyrics for reviews such as The Follies and The Passing Show of 1914, and many of his songs became music hall hits, such as "Gilbert the Filbert" and "I'll Make a Man of You".

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