Nancy & Albert ARLEN

NANCY AND ALBERT ARLEN:
117 ANNETTS PARADE MOSSY POINT.

Albert Aarons was born in Sydney in 1905 to Turkish immigrants, studied at the New South Wales State Conservatorium (graduated in 1924) and the École Normale de Musique de Paris. He then worked in London playing on stage and writing his own musical compositions and plays such as The Son of the Grand Eunuch in 1937). He was known professionally as Albert Arlen and legally changed his name to that in 1948.

Albert served in the Middle and Far East as a RAF pilot, and married actress, singer and playwright Nancy Brown in 1949. Nancy was born in Brisbane in 1909 and moved to England at the age of 14. She appeared in such musicals as Old Chelsea with leading performer Richard Tauber.




Albert put the Banjo Patterson poem Clancy of the Overflow to music, it was a best seller in 1955 with versions by Peter Dawson and Anthony Strange.

Albert and Nancy returned to Australia, living in Canberra. Together, they started writing The Sentimental Bloke around 1950, to C. J. Dennis's The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke. They borrowed some money, put together an amateur cast, and staged the show themselves in March 1961 in the Albert Hall in Canberra. Then in Melbourne it ran for five months. It eventually ran for over a year in Adelaide, Brisbane, Sydney and New Zealand.

Much of the writing of The Sentimental Bloke was done at their holiday home at 117 Annetts Parade, they had a piano there and often sang and re-sang the songs until they were right. In recognition of those sessions, they named the house Song of the Sea.

Nancy and Albert Arlen.

Richard Tauber and Nancy Arlen

In 1991 Nancy Brown Arlen published her autobiography The Black Sheep of the Brown Family: A Magic Life! 

Albert Arlen died on the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, in 1993.