Green, Adolph

▪ 2003

      American lyricist, screenwriter, and actor (b. Dec. 2, 1915, Bronx, N.Y.—d. Oct. 23, 2002, New York, N.Y.), enjoyed a six-decade-long creative collaboration with Betty Comden that resulted in not only a number of joyously enduring stage and screen musicals but so close a working and performing relationship that they were often mistakenly thought of as a married couple. They wrote the book and lyrics for such Broadway hits as On the Town (1944; filmed 1949), Wonderful Town (1953), Peter Pan (1954), and Bells Are Ringing (1956; filmed 1960), and their screenplays included those for Singin' in the Rain (1952), The Band Wagon (1953), It's Always Fair Weather (1955), and Auntie Mame (1958). Comden and Green first met at New York University, and in 1938 with some friends (including Judy Tuvim, who later became the actress Judy Holliday), they formed a cabaret act, the Revuers. To save money Comden and Green wrote their material. Leonard Bernstein sometimes joined them onstage at the piano, and when he was writing the score for a Broadway musical to be based on the Jerome Robbins ballet Fancy Free, for which he had written the music, he turned to Comden and Green for the book and lyrics. On the Town was a huge hit, and the pair's reputation was firmly established. Other composers with whom they collaborated included Jule Styne, Cy Coleman, André Previn, Morton Gould, Saul Chaplin, and Roger Edens, and they saw a number of their songs become popular standards, among them “Make Someone Happy,” “Just in Time,” “The Party's Over,” and “New York, New York.” They often included roles for themselves in their shows and performed their material in nightclubs, on television, and in such stage shows as A Party with Betty Comden and Adolph Green, in which they appeared on Broadway in 1958 and again in 1977, and Green acted in the film comedies My Favorite Year (1982) and I Want to Go Home (1989). Comden and Green won Tony Awards for five of their shows—Wonderful Town, Hallelujah, Baby! (1967), Applause (1970), On the Twentieth Century (1978), and The Will Rogers Follies (1991)—and in 1991 they were recipients of the Kennedy Center Honors.

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