Marvin Hamlisch Biography
2 June 1944, New York City, New York, USA. A pianist, arranger and conductor, who has made an indelible mark as a composer for Broadway musical shows and films, Hamlisch began as a child prodigy, and played the piano by ear at the age of five. When he was seven, he became the youngest student ever to be enrolled at the Juilliard School of Music. One of the first songs he wrote as a teenager was "Travelin' Man", which was eventually recorded by his friend, Liza Minnelli, on her first album, Liza, Liza. Through Minnelli, he was able to obtain work as a rehearsal pianist and assistant vocal arranger for some Broadway shows. Lesley Gore gave him his first song hit in 1965, when she took his "Sunshine, Lollipops And Rainbows" (lyric: Howard Liebling) into the US Top 20. After majoring in music at Queen's College, Hamlisch wrote the theme music for the 1968 film, The Swimmer, and subsequently moved to Hollywood where he composed the music for two Woody Allen comedies, Take The Money And Run (1969) and Bananas (1971). He also scored two Jack Lemmon films, The April Fools (1969) and Save The Tiger (1973). In 1971, his song "Life Is What You Make It" (lyric: Johnny Mercer), written for Kotch, was nominated for an Academy Award. Three years later, in April 1974, he collected an impressive total of three Oscars. For The Way We Were, he won Best Original Dramatic Score, and Best Title Song in conjunction with lyricists Alan And Marilyn Bergman. The third Oscar was for his adaptation of Scott Joplin's music for The Sting; Hamlisch's piano recording of one of the film's main themes, "The Entertainer", sold over a million copies. In July 1975, his first Broadway musical, the revolutionary A Chorus Line, opened at the Shubert Theatre. Conceived and directed by Michael Bennett, the songs included "One", "What I Did For Love", "Nothing", "I Can Do That", "Dance: Ten; Looks: Three", "The Music And The Mirror" and "I Hope I Get It", with lyrics by the virtually unknown Edward Kleban. They complemented perfectly the poignant and agonizing story of a group of chorus dancers auditioning for an idiosyncratic director. The production was showered with honours, including New York Drama Critics and Drama Desk Awards, nine Tony Awards, and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The Original Cast album was estimated to have sold 1,250,000 copies by October 1983. A Chorus Line closed in March 1990 after an incredible run of 6,137 performances, and held the record as Broadway's longest-running show until overtaken by Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cats in 1997. An "unsatisfactory" film version was made in 1985, directed by Richard Attenborough. Hamlisch was back on Broadway in 1979 with They're Playing Our Song, which had a book by Neil Simon, and lyrics by Carole Bayer Sager. This two-hander, starring Robert Klein and Lucie Arnaz, about the stormy relationship between two songwriters (with three singing alter egos each), is said to have been based on Hamlisch's and Bayer Sager's own liaison. The songs included "Fallin'", "If He Really Knew Me", "They're Playing Our Song", "When You're In My Arms" and "I Still Believe In Love". The show played over 1,000 performances on Broadway and did well at London's Shaftesbury Theatre. Hamlisch also provided the music (with lyrics by Christopher Adler) for a production of Jean Seberg, which enjoyed a brief run at London's National Theatre in 1983. Three years later, he was represented on Broadway again, with Smile (lyrics: Howard Ashman), but it closed after only 48 performances. Film music collaborations between Hamlisch and Bayer Sager during the 70s included the Oscar-nominated "Nobody Does It Better", from the James Bond feature, The Spy Who Loved Me (a US number 2 hit for Carly Simon), "Better Than Ever" (from Starting Over), the theme from Ice Castles, "Through The Eyes Of Love" (Academy Award nomination) and "If You Remember Me" (from Franco Zeffirelli's The Champ). Hamlisch also wrote the scores for three Neil Simon film comedies, Chapter Two, Seems Like Old Times and I Ought To Be In Pictures; the 1981 US film version of Pennies From Heaven (in collaboration with veteran bandleader Billy May); and Ordinary People, an Academy Award-winning film in 1980. He received an ASCAP award for his score to Three Men And A Baby, and gained Academy Award nominations for songs written with Alan and Marilyn Bergman, "The Last Time I Felt Like This" from Same Time Next Year (1978), and "The Girl Who Used To Be Me" from Shirley Valentine (1989). He was also nominated for his score for the Oscar-winning film Sophie's Choice (1982) and, with Edward Kleban, found himself on the short list again with "Surprise, Surprise", from the film version of their Broadway show, A Chorus Line. Hamlisch's film scores in the early 90s included Frankie And Johnny and Missing Pieces, which contained the song "High Energy", written with David Zippel. Hamlisch collaborated with Zippel again, on the score for Neil Simon's The Goodbye Girl, which, even with Bernadette Peters in the cast, could only manage a run of 188 performances in 1993. In the same year, Hamlisch conducted the London Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican Hall in the European premiere of his 25-minute work, "The Anatomy Of Peace". After serving as Barbra Streisand's musical director on her 1994 comeback tour, Hamlisch worked with her again on the film The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996), which produced yet another Oscar-nominated number, "I've Finally Found Someone" (with Streisand, Robert John Lange, Bryan Adams). In his other career as musical director of the Pittsburg Symphony Pops and the Baltimore Symphony Pops, he has regularly conducted around 70 concerts a year. However, he is due to leave the latter orchestra in June 2000 after a four-year tenure, and will create a Pops series for the National Symphony in the Kennedy Center, Washington D.C. Constantly on the lookout for another hit stage musical, Hamlisch rewrote most of the score of his 1993 flop, The Goodbye Girl (with lyricist Don Black), for a (brief) West End run in 1997.
Source: The Encyclopedia of Popular Music by Colin Larkin. Licensed from Muze.
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