Ginny Mancini

Ginny Mancini was honored as an SCL Lifetime Achievement recipient at the annual LA Holiday Dinner on December 15, 2014.

The love of composer Henry Mancini’s life has in recent years become one of the most beloved and generous philanthropists on the American music scene.

Born Virginia O’Connor, she was a talented young singer at Los Angeles’s El Monte High and L.A. City College, and went on to become one of Mel Torme’s Mel-Tones backup singers during World War II. After the war, she sang with the Tex Beneke Orchestra, where she met pianist-arranger Henry Mancini, and they were married in 1947. “It was a marriage made in heaven, that’s for sure,” she later said.

She supported Mancini’s rising and eventually chart-topping, Oscar-winning career while raising their three children during the 1950s and ’60s, eventually finding time to lend her advice and support to such key L.A. musical organizations as the Society of Singers and the Young Musicians Foundation.

Henry Mancini died in 1994, but Ginny Mancini continues to support major musical endeavors including the ASCAP Foundation, Mr. Holland’s Opus Foundation and the Henry Mancini Institute at the University of Miami. She is also an honorary life director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.