finetune artist: Maureen McGovern

b. Maureen Therese McGovern, 27 July 1949, Youngstown, Ohio, USA. The possessor of "one of the most technically proficient singing voices in all of pop", with a four-octave, coloratura range, as a young girl Maureen McGovern was influenced by Barbra Streisand. After graduating from high school in 1967, she worked as a typist, and performed folk songs in the evenings. She then embarked on a six-year tour of hotels and holiday camps in the Midwest of America, performing contemporary material with a rock band. She came to the attention of 20th Century-Fox Records, who signed her to a contract. Her first recording, in 1972, was Al Kasha and Joel Hirschhorn's "The Morning After", which was used as the love theme for the "disaster" film The Poseidon Adventure. It won an Academy Award for best song, and McGovern's version topped the US chart. In 1974, the media began calling her the "disaster queen" after she sang the Oscar-winning "We May Never Love Like This Again" (Kasha-Hirschhorn) on the soundtrack of The Towering Inferno (McGovern also played a cameo role in the picture), and "Wherever Love Takes Me" (Leslie Bricusse-Don Black), the theme from Gold, a British film starring Roger Moore and Susannah York, in which a South African gold mine is destroyed. Given her recent career history, it was hardly surprising that McGovern was cast as the singing nun, Sister Angelina, in the "disaster-spoof" movie Airplane! in 1980. By that time, she had begun to be known in Britain through her version of "The Continental", and reached the US Top 10 with "Different Worlds", the theme from the television series Angie. She had also recorded "Can You Read My Mind" (Bricusse-John Williams), the love theme from Superman.

Listen to Maureen McGovern at Finetune.

The Morning After
Can You Read My Mind
Can't Take My Eyes Off You
We May Never Love Like This Again
Angie