| Marvin
Hamlisch, since the mid-seventies,
has been one of the top composers in
film, theater, and popular music. As
holder of numerous gold record awards
for his soundtrack and cast recordings,
and the composer of some of the most
well-known songs ever cut by Barbra
Streisand and Lesley Gore, among many
others, he is among the few "stars" in
the world of popular music, composition,
and songwriting to achieve major public
recognition since the emergence of rock
music in the '60s.
Born in New York in 1944, Marvin
Hamlisch grew up on Manhattan's Upper
West Side. His father was an
accordionist and bandleader specializing
in dance music and Hamlisch showed a
fascination with music at an early age.
At age 5, Hamlisch was mimicking the
music he heard on the radio on the
piano, and he began lessons a year
later. At age 7, he auditioned for the
Juilliard School of Music by
transcribing the then-current hit
"Goodnight Irene" into different keys
spontaneously, on demand from the panel
judging him. He was accepted, becoming
the youngest student in Juilliard's
history; he later graduated from Queens
College in New York.
In his teens, Hamlisch's performing
talent seemed to beckon a career in the
concert hall, but he proved
psychologically unsuited to being a
concert pianist, owing to terrible
anxiety that proved difficult to
overcome as a boy. He turned instead to
composition, an activity that he had
always pursued privately. While still at
Juilliard, he worked as a music
counselor at an upstate camp, where some
of his songs were performed; one of the
songs he originally wrote for a show at
the camp, "Travelin' Man," was recorded
by Liza Minnelli on her debut album.
However, Hamlisch's first hit came when
he was 21 years old, from Lesley Gore,
in the form of "Sunshine, Lollipops, and
Rainbows," which rode the Billboard
charts for 11 weeks in 1965, peaking at
number 13. (The song, in Lesley Gore's
version, later figured prominently in a
Simpsons episode parodying the film
Thelma & Louise when the police chief
puts some chase music on in his
cruiser).
Minnelli helped Hamlisch land a spot
as the arranger on the Broadway
productions of Funny Girl and Fade In --
Fade Out, and it was in that capacity
that he first made his way in the
theater world. On Henry, Sweet Henry and
later on Golden Rainbow, he arranged the
dance music, while he also served as the
rehearsal pianist for The Bell Telephone
Hour on television.
Hamlisch broke into the movie
business as a result of a party he
attended where he overheard producer Sam
Speigel saying that he needed music for
a film adaptation of John Cheever's
story The Swimmer. Hamlisch went to work
on his own and presented the producer
with a main theme and was engaged to do
the score for the move. He subsequently
entered the orbit of Woody Allen during
the latter's early days in cinema,
writing the music for Allen's debut
film, Take the Money and Run (1969), and
his second movie, Bananas (1971).
Hamlisch's other early film music
efforts involved such movies as The
April Fools, Save the Tiger, Move, Kotch,
and Fat City, films that were more
interesting to the critics than to the
public, in terms of their impact -- his
song from Kotch, "Life Is What You Make
It," was also nominated for an Academy
Award in 1971. He would have to wait a
few years to become known by the public
for his film music, but Hamlisch
remained active in theater, writing the
incidental music and dance arrangements
for the musical comedy Minnie's Boys, a
feature based on the early careers of
the Marx Brothers. His connection with
the Marxes became much closer when
Hamlisch was chosen by Groucho Marx to
be his pianist and straight man (sort of
the successor to George Fenneman) in his
stage act, which he brought to night
clubs and college campuses.
The mid-'70s would prove to be
Hamlisch's heyday as a composer and a
major force in popular culture. In 1973,
Hamlisch was engaged to score The Way We
Were, a high-profile romantic drama
starring Barbra Streisand and Robert
Redford. Streisand initially balked at
using Hamlisch's title song (authored
with lyricists Marilyn and Alan
Bergman); it became one of the singer's
biggest chart hits, her first
million-selling single, and one of her
most recognizable songs. Not only did
the song win the Oscar, but so did
Hamlisch's entire score.
Having generated one of the biggest
movie-related pop hits of the first half
of the decade, Hamlisch pulled off an
even more prodigious feat the next year
with his score for The Sting. Built on
the music of Scott Joplin, the music
from The Sting helped spearhead a whole
revival of interest in Joplin's work,
which resulted not only in a hit album
for Hamlisch (The Entertainer) but huge
sales for rival recordings of Joplin's
music by figures such as Joshua Rifkin,
among others. Hamlisch also won his
second Oscar for The Sting.
Hamlisch also ventured into composing
music for television in 1975 with his
theme music for two series that
illustrated the range of the medium's
vision at the time: Beacon Hill, a
highly derivative series inspired by the
success of the British class system
drama Upstairs, Downstairs, and The Hot
L Baltimore, an envelope-ripping sitcom
(adapted from a play) about life at a
seedy hotel populated by characters who,
at the time, would have come from the
wrong sides of most viewers' tracks.
Neither lasted, but Hamlisch made a more
significant contribution to the small
screen in 1976 when he wrote the music
for the NBC adaptation of John Osborne's
The Entertainer, starring Jack Lemmon.
That same year, Hamlisch scored
perhaps the biggest hit of his career
with A Chorus Line, his very first
attempt at writing a Broadway musical,
co-authored with lyricist Edward Kleban.
Opening on Broadway in May of 1975, it
became the most successful musical of
the decade, winning multiple awards in
the bargain and running well into the
'90s. One of the score's songs, "What I
Did for Love," has been recorded
hundreds of times by artists including
Johnny Mathis, Kenny Rogers, Jim Nabors,
and the Three Degrees. Hamlisch chose
that point in his career to try and
revive his performing career with a
cabaret act that played well throughout
the country and as a pianist in
appearances with some of the country's
major orchestras.
In between his performing career and
his writing for the stage and screen,
Hamlisch managed to work in appearances
on albums by such diverse figures as
Aretha Franklin, the Carpenters, and
Peter Allen, among many others. Hamlisch
scored another hit as a composer, albeit
not of the dimensions of A Chorus Line,
with They're Playing Our Song.
Co-written with his wife, Carole Bayer
Sager, it was a semi-autobiographical
musical about a married songwriting
team, which yielded a hit cast album as
well. The couple also won an Oscar
nomination for the song "Nobody Does It
Better," written for the James Bond
movie The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) and a
Top Five hit single for vocalist Carly
Simon. The early '80s saw Hamlisch as
busy as ever, writing the music to the
Neil Simon comedies, Chapter Two, Seems
Like Old Times, and I Ought to Be in
Pictures, and the score for the dramatic
period musical film Pennies From Heaven,
as well as playing on his wife's albums.
His music for the films Sophie's Choice,
Ice Castles ("Through the Eyes of
Love"), Same Time Next Year ("The Last
Time I Felt Like This"), and Shirley
Valentine ("The Girl Who Used to Be Me")
was also nominated for Academy Awards.
Hamlisch has been somewhat less-visible
as a composer in terms of new work since
the early '80s, but has been a producer
and arranger for recordings by John
Williams and the Boston Pops Orchestra,
Liza Minnelli, and Barbra Streisand in
the '90s. |
