Marvin Hamlisch, 1944–2012

last updated 8 January 2015

Marvin Hamlisch was a master of popular song. In a career that spanned film, television, and theater, the classically trained composer won just about every award available. He received the first of his two Golden Globes in 1972, and went on to collect three Academy Awards, four Emmys, four Grammys, a Tony Award, and a Pulitzer Prize. Yet despite all that acclaim, Hamlisch remained highly sensitive to harsh critical judgment. “These songs are my babies,” he said in July. “It’s like having a baby in a hospital, taking a Polaroid, and going up to someone and saying, ‘What do you think?’ And he goes, ‘I give you a 3.’ That’s what criticism is like.”

Born in New York City to Austrian Jewish immigrants, Hamlisch showed prodigious musical talent from an early age. He entered the Juilliard School of Music for piano when he was 7 years old, “stunning the admissions committee with his renditions of ‘Goodnight Irene’ in any key they desired,” said the Associated Press. Hamlisch soon realized, however, that he wasn’t cut out to be a concert pianist, “not least because he felt sick to his stomach before every performance,” said Bloomberg.com.

In his teens, he switched from piano recitals to songwriting, and in 1963 was hired as a vocal arranger and rehearsal pianist for the Broadway production of Funny Girl, starring Barbra Streisand. Spotted playing piano at a private Hollywood party, he was engaged to score the 1968 Burt Lancaster movie The Swimmer. He went on to write scores for some 40 more films, winning Oscars for work on Streisand’s 1973 hit The Way We Were and the Paul Newman classic The Sting, for which he adapted the music of Scott Joplin and sparked a ragtime revival. Hamlisch’s roll continued with A Chorus Line, the Broadway smash that ran for 6,137 performances from 1975 to 1990.