He was best known as the lyricist for the English-language musical adaptation of Les Misérables[1] and for his collaboration with French singer and songwriter Charles Aznavour.
[3] He was one of four sons of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants William and Tilly Kretzmer, who fled the pogroms of Tsarist Russia to settle in small-town South Africa early in the 20th century.
[4] Kretzmer's oldest brother, Elliot, flew as part of a bomber crew in the South African Air Force during the Second World War, eventually becoming the Mayor of Johannesburg in 1991.
[8] After several years as a feature writer on the Daily Sketch, Kretzmer became a profile writer on the Sunday Dispatch in 1959 and the Daily Express, interviewing John Steinbeck, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams,[3] Sugar Ray Robinson,[9] Louis Armstrong,[10] Henry Miller,[9] Cary Grant, and Duke Ellington.
Kretzmer won an Ivor Novello Award for the Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren comedy hit "Goodness Gracious Me", co-composed with David Lee.
[1][12] Other award-winning Kretzmer lyrics include the English translation of "Hier Encore" into "Yesterday When I Was Young" (which was a major hit in North America for Roy Clark),[13] and the chart-topping “She”, both written with and for the French singer Charles Aznavour.
[16] Kretzmer later wrote (with composer Laurie Johnson) the lyrics for a large-scale comedy parody, The Four Musketeers, which ran for more than a year at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, starring Harry Secombe as the swordsman d'Artagnan.
[22] Kretzmer's last musical project was Kristina, based on Vilhelm Moberg’s epic suite of novels about Swedish emigrants to Minnesota in the 19th century.
The show, originally conceived and written by lyricist Björn Ulvaeus and composer Benny Andersson from ABBA, was presented and recorded in a concert version over two nights at Carnegie Hall, New York in September 2009.