Marvin Hamlisch Music

Marvin Hamlisch was born in New York City to Viennese Jewish parents. Something of a child prodigy, by age five he began mimicking music he heard on the radio on the piano. A few months before he turned seven, in 1951, he became the youngest person ever accepted to the Juilliard School. His first hit of many was Lesley Gore's 'Sunshine, Lollipops, and Rainbows'. His first film score was for The Swimmer. Later he wrote for Woody Allen's early films like Take the Money and Run. He wrote adaptations of Scott Joplin's ragtime music for the motion picture The Sting, including its theme song, "The Entertainer". He had his greatest success with The Way We Were in 1974 winning two of his three 1974 Academy Awards. He also won four Grammy Awards in 1974, two of them for "The Way We Were." He co-wrote "Nobody Does It Better" from the 1977 James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me with his then-girlfriend Carole Bayer Sager. He had Broadway success with A Chorus Line and They're Playing Our Song.In the 1980s he had success with the scores for Ordinary People (1980) and Sophie's Choice (1982). He received his first Emmy nomination for his musical work for the television show Brooklyn Bridge. Later he won his first Emmy for a Barbra Streisand special. He also received a Tony nomination for music in a revival of The Goodbye Girl. Currently, he is Principal Pops Conductor for the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra the National Symphony Orchestra (the first person to hold this position) and the San Diego Symphony. He is one of only a few people to win all four major US performing awards, Emmy Award, Grammy Award, the Oscar and Tony Award.

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