• Michelle Williams, who played Jemima Kirke in Girls, on a supremely unselfish TV tribute to the man known for the Elton John duet. “I felt that I should mention that the song I was most in love with in Girl is called Jemima Kirke,” she writes on her website, MichelleWilliams.net. It’s a truly touching tribute to a man Sondheim was so fond of, and whose music permeated Girls forever.
• Discussing her scene with Peter Sarsgaard in Company, Amy Adams remembers her involvement in a Broadway revival, when she was a volunteer with Make-A-Wish, who said she “felt overwhelmed by the impact of the opportunity”. “I decided that once I wrapped the shoot, I was going to volunteer with Make-A-Wish and bring a make-believe boy that went to the play”. Adams describes her own ambition to give him a Make-A-Wish dinner, though her scene partner “was not in the position to pay for him to go for a meal with me”. Yet, even after the request was made, “Peter called me a third time and asked me how I was getting along with the Make-A-Wish kid”. Sondheim’s enduring impact on the show “almost spoiled my real experience,” she admits.
• Man in the Moon actor Denis O’Hare says in an interview with the Guardian he learnt a lot about his craft from him, from “just taking in everything he said about going to concerts, watching performance artists and how they all play within the rules, but then occasionally going in with their own thought processes”.
• Maggie Gyllenhaal on her dear friend Sondheim – “like a parent: nice, loving, protective. Like a guardian”. “One of my favourite thoughts of the last several years has been: I hope he doesn’t have to live through any of this.”
• Vanessa Redgrave recalls her cameo as a widowed homeowner singing Into the Woods in the original 1978 Broadway production. “He was tickled – and I think what’s said is very true. I’ve always felt an incredible connection to him.” And Sondheim, she recalls, “ran into the wings and whispered that he’d wanted to get me back as the mother in Elaine Stritch: At Liberty”.
• Julianne Moore, winning an Oscar for 1979’s A Single Man (in which Sondheim’s more challenging work was employed), pays tribute to the composer: “Music and lyrics open doors to your imagination. And in theatre I’ve seen to the point of paralysis, many a writer struggling for words to open doors to their imagination. In producing A Little Night Music, with a cast of local NYC producers, Sondheim opened those doors, even with absurdly small budgets.”
• My American partner, Ramin Bahrani, reflects: “There’s no greater source of inspiration to me than to hear a song from [Sondheim] for a new movie or to catch the thrill of a new production. He didn’t take all his passion as a detriment; it always served as a frame or a source of energy to any project I worked on.”
• Before he died of complications from AIDS at 86, Sondheim got together with David Bowie to record a song inspired by John Lennon’s White Album single Queenie Eye. It’s released in a CD-only “tribute album” by Love Armada, produced by Bowie himself, and contains text, lyrics and music by the two men. After writing much about Sondheim, Bowie was a “force of nature”, who “dazzled me with his remarkable songwriting, incisive character study, but always an absolute pleasure to work with”.
• The highest tribute to Sondheim comes from Andrew Lloyd Webber, whose eponymous company wrote the touching tribute on Broadway, My Fair Lady – and was recently criticised by a former writer who called the legendary show “manufactured smut”. “Here’s a kid from Australia with a great imagination and a fantastic talent,” Lloyd Webber says of Sondheim. “He was very kind to us and he really did write this great show. It was a wonderful collaborative effort.”