Robert Mellin

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Robert Mellin, born Israel Melnikoff on September 22, 1902, in Kiev, then part of the Russian Empire, was a Russian-born American composer, lyricist, and music publisher. He grew up in Chicago and began his career as a music plugger at Remick Music. In the early 1940s he moved to New York and started his own company in 1947. He moved to Europe in the early 1950s and wrote music and lyrics for hundreds of songs over the next twenty years. His biggest hit was My One and Only Love, written with lyricist Guy Wood; it was recorded by many artists, including Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Chet Baker, and the John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman duet.

In 1962 Mellin wrote lyrics for Acker Bilk’s instrumental Stranger on the Shore, enabling vocal versions. From the mid-1950s he ran his own publishing company, Robert Mellin Music, based on Denmark Street in London. The company handled exclusive rights to many film scores from Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Italy. With Gian-Piero Reverberi, he wrote the theme music for the 1964 TV series The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, which became a hit single, and in 1966 he composed the score for Don Quijote. He also wrote music for films in the 1960s. Mellin married songwriter Patricia Rossiter in 1980. He died on July 10, 1994, at the age of 91 while on a business trip in Rome.