‘A Chorus Line’ Composer Marvin Hamlisch dies at 68

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The American composer who wrote the scores for dozens of movies and a half-dozen or so Broadway shows and won Oscars, Emmys, Grammys, a Tony and a Pulitzer Prize, Marvin Hamlisch has died in Los Angeles. He was 68.

Marvin Hamlisch

The musical creative force behind the films The Sting and The Way We Were for which he won a total of three Oscars, Hamlisch collapsed after a brief illness and died on Monday, a family spokesman said in a statement.

In a 2010 interview he told Broadway World that in writing The Way We Were he was trying to match “a very yin-yang sort of movie.”

He explained: “I wanted to write something that was uplifting and positive, on the other hand, there is a tremendous amount of bitter-sweetness to that film – and bittersweet romance – so, it’s a real duality. And that’s why I think the song – though it’s in the major mode – is quite sad,” he said.

The New York City-born composer, raised by Jewish parents and showing an early ability to mimic music as a young child, started out his professional career as a rehearsal pianist for Funny Girl, beginning a long history of working with Streisand. He has said Streisand “has the best voice there is.”

His collaborations with her included his role as the musical director and arranger of Streisand’s 1994 US concert tour, for which he won two Emmy Awards and he wrote the score for Streisand’s 1996 film, The Mirror has Two Faces, for which Hamlisch earned an Oscar nomination for Streisand’s and Bryan Adams duet, ‘I’ve Finally Found Someone.’

His other film scores notably included Sophie’s Choice, Ordinary People, and he co-wrote the ballad ‘Nobody Does It Better‘ for the 1977 James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me.

Starting with 1969 film The Swimmer, he scored films for the next several decades, including Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run and Bananas, Save the Tiger, Ice Castles, right up to Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant! in 2009. He had lately been writing the score for a new Soderbergh movie based on the life of pianist Liberace.

On Broadway, he won a Tony award and a Pulitzer Prize for drama for the 1975 musical A Chorus Line, which at the time became the most successful show on the Great White Way. He also wrote the scores for the Broadway musicals They’re Playing Our Song, (1978), The Goodbye Girl (1993) and Sweet Smell Of Success (2002).

He also won four Grammy Awards including two for The Way We Were.