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In Remembrance: Betty Comden
Betty Comden,
the Tony Award-winning Broadway lyricist who co-wrote the screenplay
for Singing In The Rain, has passed away on November 23, 2006
in New York City, NY. She was 89.
Born Elizabeth
Cohen on May 3, 1917 in Brooklyn, NY, Comden studied drama at the
New York University. Changing her last name, she joined the
Washington Square Players in the mid-1930s, where she met her future
writing collaborator Adolph Green. The two joined with Judy Holliday
and several others to form the cabaret act The Revuers, a show
featuring comical and satirical skits and songs. A young Leonard
Bernstein would often accompany the group on piano. The show
premiered at the Village Vanguard in 1939 and was successful enough
that they were coaxed to Hollywood to appear in the 20th
Century Fox musical comedy Greenwich Village (1944), though
they ultimately received a few scant moments of screen time.
Returning from
Hollywood, Comden and Green were contacted by Bernstein who wanted
them to adapt a ballet called Fancy Free that he had been
developing with choreographer Jerome Robbins into a Broadway show.
The result was On The Town, a comedy about three young navy
seamen who have a 24-hour shore leave in Manhattan. In addition to
writing the show’s book, Comden and Green wound up in the show’s
cast- he as one of the sailors and she as an anthropologist that one
of the sailors fall for. The two writers collaborated on numerous
other Broadway shows including Wonderful Town, Peter Pan,
Bells Are Ringing, Subways Are For Sleeping,
Applause and The Will Rogers Follies.
Comden and
Green returned to Hollywood when MGM Studios hired them to write the
1947 silver screen adaptation of the stage show Good News.
They then collaborated with writer Sidney Sheldon for the original
musical The Barkleys Of Broadway (1949), which reunited Fred
Astaire and Ginger Rogers on screen, before adapting their On The
Town for director Stanley Donen.
The pair’s next
assignment at MGM was to build a story around several of the popular
songs owned by the studio. The result was Singing In The Rain,
perhaps the greatest musical to emerge out of Hollywood’s golden
age. Setting their story during the turbulent time that filmmaking
was transitioning from silents to talkies, the pair interviewed many
studio workers who lived through that period and incorporated many
of their stories into the final screenplay.
The next two
screenplays Comden and Green would work on – 1953’s The Band
Wagon for director Vincente Minnelli and 1955’s It’s Always
Fair Weather for Stanley Donen – would earn the pair Academy
Award nominations for Best Writing- Story and Screenplay.
Despite their
success, Comden and Green didn’t stay in Hollywood much longer. They
only worked on three more screenplays- Auntie Mame (1958),
Bells Are Ringing (1960) and What A Way To Go! (1964).
Although they wrote no more screenplays, they did adapt the film
All About Eve (1950) into the Broadway musical Applause
in 1970 which starred Lauren Bacall.
In 1984, Comden
returned to Hollywood for a small on-screen appearance as Greta
Garbo in Sidney Lumet’s Garbo Talks. She also had a
small role in James Ivory’s Slaves Of New York (1989). Comden
and Green also wrote the lyrics for the song "Mamushka" for The
Addams Family (1991). |
