Marvin Hamlisch, the classically trained New York piano prodigy who became a legendary composer on Broadway and in Hollywood, has died after a brief illness. He was 68.
The man who scored the tunes for the Broadway smash “A Chorus Line” died Monday in LA.
Hamlisch’s prolific career netted 18 major awards. He was one of only two people — with Richard Rodgers — to win an Emmy, Oscar, Tony, Grammy and Pulitzer.
When he became the first person to win three Oscars in one night, in 1974, he joked to the audience on his third trip to the podium, “I think we can talk to each other as friends.”
Born in New York, he became, at age 7, the youngest-ever student admitted to the Juilliard School of Music. His professional career began at 22 when he was hired as a rehearsal pianist for “Funny Girl” on Broadway, where he met Barbra Streisand.
“I’m devastated,” said Streisand, at whose 1998 wedding to James Brolin Hamlisch performed. “The world will remember Marvin for his brilliant musical accomplishments . . . but when I think of him now, it was his brilliantly quick mind, his generosity and delicious sense of humor.”
His unlikely breakthrough came in 1965, when he co-wrote the Leslie Gore hit “Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows.”
That led Hamlisch to Hollywood, where, by luck, he was asked by producer Sam Spiegel to play piano at a party. The impressed Spiegel hired him to write the first of more than 40 movie scores.
During the 1960s, he also befriended Liza Minnelli.
“Marvin Hamlisch and I have been best friends since I was 13 years old,” she told the Miami Herald. “I have lost my lifelong best friend, and, sadly, we have lost a splendid, splendid talent.”
Over 40 years, Hamlisch composed for movies ranging from early Woody Allen comedies and a James Bond film (“The Spy Who Loved Me,” with a title song sung by Carly Simon), “The Goodbye Girl,” to dramas like “Sophie’s Choice” and “Ordinary People.”
But he was best known for “The Way We Were” and his adapting of Scott Joplin ragtime works for “The Sting,” both in 1973.
Returning to Broadway, Hamlisch triumphed with “A Chorus Line,” whose songs included “One” and “What I Did for Love.”
In his autobiography, “The Way I Was,” he recalled how he was driven by his father, a Vienna-born accordionist, who told him, “By the time [George] Gershwin was your age, he was dead. And he’d written a concerto. Where’s your concerto, Marvin?”
He remained busy until the end. He was working on a new musical, “Gotta Dance,” as well as the score for a movie about Liberace.