“I can make a song up about anything: garbage, the weather, things in the news,” he once said. He created a musical high-wire act called “rent-a-composer,” in which he composed instant songs to titles called out by audience members. Hamlisch was the somber-looking, bespectacled pinup of a nerdy girl’s dreams, sending Gilda Radner as her “Saturday Night Live” character Lisa Loopner into spasms of awkward ecstasy. He was principal pops conductor at a half-dozen symphony orchestras, including the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington from 2000 to 2011 and again as recently as last month for a concert date. He toured the country playing the piano and warbling for decades, including as a musical accompanist and straight man for comedian Groucho Marx in the early 1970s. Hamlisch, who died Monday at 68 in Los Angeles of undisclosed causes, was one of the most ubiquitous show-business personalities of his generation.
Hamlisch’s movie portfolio included the inspired revival of Scott Joplin’s jaunty ragtime music for “The Sting,” the sweepingly romantic theme for “The Way We Were” and the sensuous ballad “Nobody Does It Better” for the James Bond film “The Spy Who Loved Me.” He also wrote music for two early Woody Allen comedies and the score for the Holocaust drama “Sophie’s Choice.” He went on to write everything heard everywhere, or so it seemed in the 1970s and early 1980s when he established himself as a dominant force in Hollywood and on Broadway.īesides “A Chorus Line” - one of the most enduring stage musicals of all time - Mr.
At 6, Marvin Hamlisch became one of the youngest students ever admitted to the prestigious Juilliard music school in New York.