A star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame will be unveiled Friday honoring Charles Fox, who composed the music to more than 100 films, including “9 to 5” and “Goodbye, Columbus,” and the theme songs for such television series as “Happy Days” and “Laverne & Shirley.”
Fellow songwriters Paul Williams and Diane Warren will be among the speakers — along with Fox’s son, Robbie, an actor and director, and a “special guest,” according to Ana Martinez, producer of the Hollywood Walk of Fame,
The ceremony is set to begin at 11:30 a.m. in front of the Musicians Institute at 6752 Hollywood Blvd., and will be streamed at walkoffame.com.
The 83-year-old Fox’s star will be a few feet from the stars honoring his late friends, composer Jerry Goldsmith and songwriter Hal David.
The ceremony comes two days after the release of a documentary on Fox’s life and music, “Killing Me Softly with His Songs” — a title inspired by “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” which Fox wrote with Norman Gimbel, and which brought them the Grammy for song of the year in 1974.
Friday’s event also comes seven days before Fox will perform a concert of songs from the film at Herb Alpert’s Vibrato Grill Jazz in Bel Air.
The star will be the 2,777th since the completion of the Walk of Fame in 1961 with the initial 1,558 stars.
Born Oct. 30, 1940 in New York City, where he was raised, Fox told City News Service he had taken piano lessons “for years,” was a student at the High School of Music and Art and “became obsessed with sitting at the piano and inventing melodic lines and see how far I could take them into sounding like a composition.”
In high school, Fox studied composition and orchestration and started writing short pieces. In his first summer after high school, Fox studied at the music conservatory at the Fontainebleau palace in France. His teacher, conductor-composer Nadia Boulanger, then asked him to come to Paris, staying two years.
“When I began my professional career in music, I never thought that I would add `songwriter’ to my interests,” Fox said. “When Bob Crew, who was one of the leading songwriters and record producers of that era, asked me to compose the score for the film, `Barbarella,’ he then said, `We’ll need five or six songs in the film. You and I will write the songs.’ Just like that, poof, I became a songwriter.”
Fox received best original song Oscar nominations in 1976 for “Richard’s Window,” from “The Other Side of the Mountain,” and in 1979 for “Ready To Take A Chance Again,” from “Foul Play.”
Fox’s other Grammy nomination came in 1982, for best album of original score written for a motion picture or a television special for “9 to 5,” which lost to the John Williams-composed score from “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”
Fox won an Emmy in 1973 for outstanding achievement in music composition — for a series or a single program of a series (first year of music’s use only) for “Love, American Style.” He was also nominated in the same category in 1971 for the ABC comedy anthology, and in 1972 for the series for outstanding achievement in music composition.
Fox and Gimbel also received an Emmy nomination in 1979 for outstanding music composition for a series for the CBS law-school drama, “The Paper Chase.”
Fox’s other honors include induction in the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2004.
Fox has also composed for ballets by the San Francisco and Smuin ballets and the Dance Theatre of Harlem, has performed salsa music at Havana’s opera house and jazz at Le Duc des Lombards jazz club in Paris. He recently completed a musical, “Ain’t That Jazz” with Alain Boublil, who co-wrote the lyrics for “Les Misérables.”
When asked what it means to receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Fox recalled his first trip to California, in 1968, with his wife Joan to write the score for the romantic comedy-drama “Goodbye, Columbus.”
“One of the first things that we did as first-time tourists was to walk along Hollywood Boulevard and conjure up images of the stars that were actually on that spot at one time,” Fox said. “Never did I imagine that one day my name would be among those. Now that that day has come, I just feel so fortunate to have had all the opportunities that I’ve had in music that have led to this day.”