Marvin Hamlisch,
the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer who imbued his movie and Broadway
scores with pizazz and panache and often found his songs in the upper
reaches of the pop charts, died on Monday in Los Angeles. He was 68 and
lived in New York.
He collapsed on Monday after a brief illness, a family friend said.
For a few years starting in 1973, Mr. Hamlisch spent practically as much
time accepting awards for his compositions as he did writing them. He
is one of a handful of artists to win every major creative prize, some
of them numerous times, including an Oscar for “
The Way We Were” (1973, shared with the lyricists Marilyn and Alan Bergman), a
Grammy
as best new artist (1974), and a Tony and a Pulitzer for “A Chorus
Line” (1975, shared with the lyricist Edward Kleban, the director
Michael Bennett and the book writers James Kirkwood Jr. and Nicholas
Dante).
All told, he won three Oscars, four Emmys and four Grammys. His
omnipresence on awards and talk shows made him one of the last in a line
of celebrity composers that included Henry Mancini, Burt Bacharach and
Stephen Sondheim. Mr. Hamlisch, bespectacled and somewhat gawky, could
often appear to be the stereotypical music school nerd — in fact, at 7
he was the youngest student to be accepted to the Juilliard School at
the time — but his appearance belied his intelligence and ability to
banter easily with the likes of Johnny Carson and Merv Griffin. His
melodies were sure-footed and sometimes swashbuckling. “One,” from “A
Chorus Line,” with its punchy, brassy lines, distills the essence of the
Broadway showstopper.
“A Chorus Line,” a backstage musical in which Broadway dancers told
their personal stories, started as a series of taped workshops, then
evolved into a show that opened at the Public Theater in 1975 and moved
to Broadway later that year. It ran for 6,137 performances, the most of
any Broadway musical until it was surpassed by “Cats.”
“I have to keep reminding myself that ‘A Chorus Line’ was initially
considered weird and off the wall,” Mr. Hamlisch told The New York Times
in 1983. “You mustn’t underestimate an audience’s intelligence.” The
lyricist Alan Jay Lerner called “A Chorus Line” “the great show business
story of our time.”
Mr. Hamlisch had a long
association with Barbra Streisand
that began when, at 19, he became a rehearsal pianist for her show
“Funny Girl.” Yet he told Current Biography in 1976 that Ms. Streisand
was reluctant to record what became the pair’s greatest collaboration,
“The Way We Were,” the theme from the 1973 movie of the same name in
which Ms. Streisand starred with Robert Redford.
“I had to beg her to sing it,” he said. “She thought it was too simple.”
Mr. Hamlisch prevailed, though, and the song became a No. 1 pop single,
an Oscar winner and a signature song for Ms. Streisand. They continued
to work together across the decades; Mr. Hamlisch was the musical
director for her 1994 tour and again found himself accepting an award
for his work, this time an Emmy.
Ms. Streisand said in a statement through her publicist that the world
will always remember Mr. Hamlisch’s music, but that it was “his
brilliantly quick mind, his generosity and delicious sense of humor that
made him a delight to be around.”
Mr. Hamlisch had his second-biggest pop hit with “Nobody Does It
Better,” the theme from the James Bond film “The Spy Who Loved Me,”
written with the lyricist Carole Bayer Sager.
Carly Simon’s recording of the song reached No. 2 in 1977. Thom Yorke, the lead singer of the band Radiohead,
which has performed the song in concert more recently, called it “the sexiest song ever written.”
Yet for all Mr. Hamlisch’s pop success — he and Ms. Bayer Sager also
wrote a No. 1 soul hit for Aretha Franklin, “Break It to Me Gently” —
his first love was writing for theater and the movies. His score for
“The Sting,” which adapted the ragtime music of Scott Joplin, made him a
household ubiquity in 1973.
Despite the acclaim he often said he thought his background scores were
underappreciated. He said he would love for an audience to “see a movie
once without the music” to appreciate how the experience changed. He
would go on to write more than 40 movie scores.
Marvin Frederick Hamlisch was born June 2, 1944, in New York . His
father, Max, was an accordionist, and at age 5 Mr. Hamlisch was
reproducing on the piano songs he heard on the radio; Juilliard soon
followed. According to his wife, Terre Blair, he was being groomed as
“the next Horowitz,” but when all the doors were closed and everyone was
gone he would play show tunes. He performed some concerts and recitals
as a teenager at Town Hall and other Manhattan auditoriums, but soon
gave up on the idea of being a full-time performer.
“Before every recital, I would violently throw up, lose weight, the
veins on my hands would stand out,” he told Current Biography.
He had no such reaction, though, when his song “
Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows,”
with lyrics by Howard Liebling, became a Top 20 hit in 1965 for Lesley
Gore, when Mr. Hamlisch was 21. The movie producer Sam Spiegel heard him
playing piano a few years later at a party and as a result Mr. Hamlisch
scored his first film, “The Swimmer.”
Mr. Hamlisch soon moved to Los Angeles, and the successes snowballed.
But he remained a New Yorker through and through. He once said he liked
New York because it was the one place “where you’re allowed to wear a
tie.”
After “A Chorus Line,” Mr. Hamlisch scored another Broadway hit,
“They’re Playing Our Song,” based on his relationship with Ms. Bayer
Sager (who wrote the lyrics), in 1979. It ran for 1,082 performances.
After that, the accolades subsided but the work didn’t. He worked with
various lyricists on subesequent musicals, including “Jean Seberg”
(1983), which was staged in London but never reached Broadway, and
“Smile” (1986), which did reach Broadway but had a very brief run. His
most steady work continued to come from the movies. He wrote the
background scores for “Ordinary People,” “Sophie’s Choice” and, most
recently, “The Informant.” His later theater scores included “The
Goodbye Girl” (1993), “Sweet Smell of Success” (2002) and “Imaginary
Friends” (2002). He had also completed the scores for an HBO movie based
on the life of Liberace, “
Behind the Candelabra,” and for a musical based on the Jerry Lewis film “The Nutty Professor,” which opened
in Nashville last month.
According to
his official Web site,
Mr. Hamlisch held the title of pops conductor for the Pittsburgh
Symphony Orchestra, the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, the Dallas
Symphony Orchestra and others.
In more recent years, Mr. Hamlisch became an ambassador for music,
traveling the country and performing and giving talks at schools. He
often criticized the cuts in arts education.
“I don’t think the American government gets it,” he said during an
interview at the Orange County High School of the Arts in Santa Ana,
Calif. “I don’t think they understand it’s as important as math and
science. It rounds you out as a person. I think it gives you a love of
certain things. You don’t have to become the next great composer. It’s
just nice to have heard certain things or to have seen certain things.
It’s part of being a human being.”
Despite all his honors, Mr. Hamlisch was always most focused on, and
most excited about, his newest project. Ms. Blair said. And, she said,
he was always appreciative of his gift: “He used to say, ‘It’s easy to
write things that are so self-conscious that they become pretentious,
that have a lot of noise. It’s very hard to write a simple melody.’ ”
