Betty Comden (May 3 1917 November 23 2006), along with Adolph Green (1914 2002), was one-half of the musical duo Comden and Green, the writing team that 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 was born Elizabeth Cohen in New York City . 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 most of Bernstein's music at the request of Arthur Freed, who did not care for the Bernstein score. 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. Betty Comden died of heart failure following an undisclosed illness of several months at New York Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan on Thanksgiving Day, November 23 2006, aged 89. (more)
Type: person
Genres: librettist, entertainment, music, movies
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Wonderful Town:
Wonderful Town is a musical with a book written by Joseph A. Fields and Jerome Chodorov, lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green and music by Leonard Bernstein. It is based on Fields and Chodorov's 1940 play My Sister Eileen, which is itself based on
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On the Town (musical):
On the Town is a musical with music by Leonard Bernstein and book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, based on the 1944 ballet Fancy Free. The musical generated several popular and classic songs, among them "New York, New York", "Lonely Town
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On the Town (film):
On the Town is a 1949 movie musical with music by Leonard Bernstein and Roger Edens and book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green. It is an adaptation of a Broadway stage musical produced in 1944, although many changes in script and score were
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Bells Are Ringing (musical):
Bells Are Ringing is a musical with a book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green and music by Jule Styne. The story revolves around Ella, who works at an answering service and the characters that she meets there. Three of the show's tunes - "Lo
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It's Always Fair Weather:
It's Always Fair Weather is a 1955 MGM musical film scripted by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, who also wrote the show's lyrics, scored by Andre Previn and starring Gene Kelly, Dan Dailey, Cyd Charisse, Michael Kidd, and Dolores Gray. Directed by Kel
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Two on the Aisle:
Two on the Aisle is a musical revue with a book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green and music by Jule Styne. The project marked Comden and Green's return to Broadway following their successful reign at MGM (where they penned the classic Singi
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A Doll's Life:
A Doll's Life is a musical with a book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green and music by Larry Grossman. It is among the most notorious flops in Broadway theatre history. Set within the framework of a contemporary rehearsal of Henrik Ibsen's c
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A Party with Betty Comden and Adolph Green:
A Party with Betty Comden and Adolph Green is a musical revue with a book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green and music by Leonard Bernstein, Jule Styne, André Previn, Saul Chaplin, and Roger Edens. The evening was comprised of material writt
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Peter Pan (1954 musical):
Peter Pan is a musical adaptation of Sir J. M. Barrie's renowned play Peter Pan and Barrie's own novelization of it, Peter and Wendy. In different productions of the musical, the title character of Peter Pan has been played famously by Mary Martin, S
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The Band Wagon:
The Band Wagon (1953) is a musical comedy film that many critics rank (along with Singin' in the Rain) as the finest of the MGM musicals, although it was only a modest box-office success. It tells the story of an aging musical star who hopes a Broadw
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Good News (films):
Good News is the title of two American MGM musical films based on the 1927 stage production of the same name. The first, released in 1930, was directed by Nick Grinde. The cast included Bessie Love, Cliff Edwards and Penny Singleton. The film was sho
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Arthur Freed:
Arthur Freed (September 9, 1894 - April 12, 1973) was born Arthur Grossman in Charleston, South Carolina. He was an American lyricist and a Hollywood film producer. Freed began his career in vaudeville, and he appeared with the Marx Brothers. He soon
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Cy Coleman:
For the fictional principal Seymour Kaufman, see Room 222. Cy Coleman (June 14, 1929 - November 18, 2004) was an American composer, songwriter, and jazz pianist. He was born Seymour Kaufman on June 14, 1929, in New York City to Eastern European Jewis
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The Barkleys of Broadway:
The Barkleys of Broadway is a 1949 musical film from the Arthur Freed unit at MGM that reunited Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers after ten years apart. Directed by Charles Walters, the screenplay is by Betty Comden, Adolph Green and Sidney Sheldon, the
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Fred Astaire:
Fred Astaire (born Frederick Austerlitz; May 10, 1899 - June 22, 1987) was an American Academy Award-winning film and Broadway stage dancer, choreographer, singer and actor. His stage and subsequent film career spanned a total of seventy-six years, d
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Leonard Bernstein:
Leonard Bernstein ( "BERN-stine"; August 25 1918 – October 14 1990) was an American conductor, composer, author, music lecturer and pianist. He was the first conductor born and educated in the United States of America to receive world-wide acclaim .
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Jerome Robbins:
Jerome Robbins (October 11, 1918 - July 29, 1998) was an American award-winning film director and choreographer whose work has included everything from classical ballet to contemporary musical theater. Among the numerous stage productions he worked o
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Singin' in the Rain (film):
Singin' in the Rain is a 1952 comedy musical film starring Gene Kelly, Donald O'Connor, and Debbie Reynolds and directed by Kelly and Stanley Donen, with Kelly also providing the choreography. It offers a comic depiction of Hollywood's transition fro
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Jule Styne:
Jule Styne (December 31, 1905 - September 20, 1994) was a British-born American songwriter especially famous for a series of Broadway Musicals, which included several very well known and frequently revived shows.
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André Previn:
André Previn (Andreas Ludwig Priwin) KBE (b. April 6 1929, Berlin) is a German-born American Academy Award and Grammy Award winning pianist, conductor, and composer. He first came to prominence by arranging and composing Hollywood film scores in 1948
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Kennedy Center Honors:
The Kennedy Center Honors is an annual honor given to artists in the performing arts. The Honors ceremony is one of the highlights in the cultural life of the United States. The Honors was the brainchild of George Stevens, Jr. (who remains involved),
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My Sister Eileen:
My Sister Eileen originated as a series of short stories by Ruth McKenney that eventually evolved into a book, a play, a musical, two films, and a CBS television series in the 1960-1961 season. The autobiographical stories originally were published i
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Judy Holliday:
Judy Holliday (June 21, 1921 – June 7, 1965) was an American Academy- and Tony Award-winning actress.
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Erasmus Hall High School:
Erasmus Hall Campus High School is a three-year public high school in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, operated as part of the New York City Department of Education. It primarily serves the 10th to 12th grades. It is located on the east side of
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Singin' in the Rain (musical):
Singin' in the Rain is a musical with a book by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, lyrics by Arthur Freed, and music by Nacio Herb Brown. Adapted from the 1952 movie of the same name, the plot closely adheres to the original. Set in Hollywood in the wani
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Lorelei (musical):
Lorelei is a musical with a book by Kenny Solms and Gail Parent, lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and music by Jule Styne. It is a revision of the Joseph Fields-Anita Loos book for the 1949 production Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and includes man
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Applause (musical):
Applause is a musical with a book by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, lyrics by Lee Adams, and music by Charles Strouse. It won the Tony Award for Best Musical and Lauren Bacall won the Tony for Best Leading Lady. Based on the screenplay for the classi
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The Will Rogers Follies:
The Will Rogers Follies is a Tony Award-winning musical with a book by Peter Stone, lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and music by Cy Coleman. It focuses on the life and career of famed humorist and performer Will Rogers, using as a backdrop t
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On the Twentieth Century:
On the Twentieth Century is an award-winning musical with book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green and music by Cy Coleman. Part operetta, part farce, part screwball comedy, the story involves the behind-the-scenes relationship of a temperame
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Do Re Mi (musical):
Do Re Mi is a musical with music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green and book by Garson Kanin, who also directed. The plot centers on a minor-league con man who decides to go (somewhat) straight by going into the business of juke b
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Subways Are For Sleeping:
Subways Are for Sleeping is a musical with a book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green and music by Jule Styne. The original Broadway production played in 1961-62. The musical was inspired by an article about subway homelessness in the March 1
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Hallelujah, Baby!:
Hallelujah, Baby! is a musical with music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Adolph Green and Betty Comden, and libretto by Arthur Laurents. The musical opened on Broadway on April 26 1967 at the Martin Beck Theatre, running for 293 performances. It was direct
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Say, Darling:
Say, Darling is a three-act comic play by Abe Burrows and Marian and Richard Bissell about the creation of a Broadway musical. Although the play featured nine original songs with lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green and music by Jule Styne, all of
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Fade Out - Fade In:
Fade Out - Fade In is a musical with a book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green and music by Jule Styne. The story involves the movie industry in the 1930s and starred Carol Burnett. Comden and Green, who tackled the problems Hollywood player
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