Betty Comden

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Betty Comden (May 3, 1917 - November 23, 2006) was born Elizabeth Cohen in New York City on May 3, 1917 (see [1], [2]) although many sources cited 1915, 1918 and 1919 as possible years of birth. She died of heart failure following an undisclosed illness of several months at New York Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan on Thanksgiving Day, November 23, 2006.

Along with Adolph Green (1914 - 2002), Comden was one-half of the musical duo Comden and Green, the writing team who penned the screenplays and songs for some of the most beloved movie musicals, particularly as part of Arthur Freed's production unit at MGM during the genre's heyday. They also collaborated on numerous Broadway productions. The pair were not married, although many thought they were. They did share a unique comic genius and sophisticated wit that enabled them to forge a six-decades-long partnership that produced some of Hollywood and Broadway's greatest hits.

Betty Comden, Adolph Green, and Judy Holliday during rehearsals for their hit Broadway musical, Bells Are Ringing

After high school, Green worked as a runner on Wall Street while he tried to make it as an actor. He met Comden, a graduate of Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, through mutual friends in 1938 while she was studying drama at New York University. They formed a troupe called the Revuers, which performed at the Village Vanguard, a club in Greenwich Village.

Among the members of the company was a young comedian named Judy Tuvim, who later changed her name to Judy Holliday, and Green's good friend, a young musician named Leonard Bernstein, frequently accompanied them on the piano. The act's success earned them a movie offer and the Revuers traveled west in hopes of finding fame in Greenwich Village, a 1944 movie starring Carmen Miranda and Don Ameche, but their roles were so small they barely were noticed, and they quickly returned to New York.

Their first Broadway effort joined them with Bernstein for On the Town, a musical romp about three sailors on leave in New York City that was an expansion of a ballet entitled Fancy Free on which Bernstein had been working with choreographer Jerome Robbins. Comden and Green wrote the lyrics and book, which included sizeable parts for themselves. Their next two musicals, Billion Dollar Baby (1945) and Bonanza Bound (1947) were not successful, and once again they headed to California, where they immediately found work at MGM.

They wrote the screenplay for Good News, starring June Allyson and Peter Lawford, The Barkleys of Broadway for Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, and then adapted On the Town for Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly, scrapping Bernstein's music at the request of Arthur Freed, who did not care for the Bernstein score.

On the cover of Blossom Dearie's tribute LP Blossom Dearie Sings Comden and Green (Verve, 1959)

They reunited with Kelly for their most successful project, the classic Singin' in the Rain, about Hollywood in the final days of the silent film era. Considered by many film historians to be the best movie musical of all time, it ranked #10 on the list of the 100 Best American Movies of the 20th Century, compiled by the American Film Institute in 1998.

They followed this with another hit, The Band Wagon, in which the characters of Lester and Lily, a husband-and-wife team that writes the screenplay for the show-within-a-show, were patterned after themselves. They were Oscar-nominated twice, for their screenplays for The Band Wagon and It's Always Fair Weather, both of which earned them a Screen Writers Guild Award, as did On the Town.

Their stage work during the next few years included the revue Two on the Aisle, starring Bert Lahr and Dolores Gray, Wonderful Town, an adaptation of the comedy hit My Sister Eileen, with Rosalind Russell and Edie Adams as two sisters from Ohio trying to make it in the Big Apple, and Bells Are Ringing, which reunited them with Judy Holliday as an operator at a telephone answering service. The score, including the standards "Just in Time", "Long Before I Knew You", and "The Party's Over", proved to be one of their richest.

In 1958, they appeared on Broadway in A Party with Betty Comden and Adolph Green, a revue that included some of their early sketches. It was a critical and commercial success, and they brought an updated version back to Broadway in 1977.

Among their other credits are the Mary Martin version of Peter Pan for both Broadway and television, a streamlined Die Fledermaus for the Metropolitan Opera, and stage musicals for Carol Burnett, Leslie Uggams, and Lauren Bacall, among others. Their many collaborators included Garson Kanin, Cy Coleman, Jule Styne, and André Previn.

The team was not without its failures. In 1982, A Doll's Life, a misguided attempt to figure out what Nora did after she abandoned her husband in Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House, ran for only five performances, although they received Tony Award nominations for its book and score.

Comden and Green received Kennedy Center Honors in 1991.

1 Family
2 Additional Broadway credits
3 Theatre awards and nominations
4 External links
5 Reference

[edit] Family

Comden married Steven Kyle, a designer and businessman, in 1942. He died in 1979 and she never remarried. They had two children, a daughter, Susanna, and a son, Alan, a drug addict who contracted AIDS and died in 1990.