Composer Marvin Hamlisch as Remembered by his Friends
Over a long career in music, it’s rare to find someone who has received as much praise and distinction as the composer Marvin Hamlisch. He wrote numerous scores for movies, stage shows, and TV specials, and has won just about every kind of award a composer can win: Emmys, Grammys, Oscars, a Tony and a Pulitzer. His friends and colleagues remember him as an astonishing musical talent with an endless supply of imagination, energy and passion. Although he passed away two weeks ago, at the age of 68, his memory lives on through his music, including scores for The Sting, The Way We Were, and A Chorus Line.
Hamlisch was a precocious young talent. He started studying at Juilliard a few months before he turned seven, although he didn’t impress the audition panel with the usual skills of a child prodigy: My big thing at Juilliard — because I hadn’t taken that many piano lessons at that point — was not that I could play Bach or Beethoven, but that I could play ‘Goodnight Irene’ in any key.” His first job was a rehearsal pianist for Funny Girl, where he first met Barbara Streisand. Right before his 30th birthday, he had his first major triumph: he won three Oscars at the 1974 Academy Awards, for Best Original Dramatic Score and Best Original Song (The Way We Were) and Best Original Song or Adaptation Score (The Sting).
Hamlisch is probably best remembered for his score to the hit 1975 Broadway musical A Chorus Line. The Pulizter winning musical describes the personalities of 19 characters who are auditioning as dancers for a musical. The actress Donna McKechnie says that when she first heard the music she knew “immediately when I heard that, that we were into something good.” The song “At the Ballet,” to her, “is the most beautiful song to convey the simple everyday feelings of a dancer.”
Marvin Hamlisch is fondly remembered as a talent with few equals. His colleagues describe him a warm and friendly person. Barbara Streisand described him as “a true musical genius, but above all that, he was a beautiful human being.” He will be missed both in the musical world and be all those who were touched by his warm personal spirit.
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