Adolph Green, Kennedy Center Honors

Phyllis Newman Born March 19, 1933 Jersey City, New Jersey, U.S. Died September 15, 2019 (aged 86) New York City, U.S. Occupation Actress, singer Years active 1952–2019 Spouse(s) Adolph Green (m. 1960; died 2002) Children Adam Green Amanda Green Phyllis Newman (March 19, 1933 – September 15, 2019) was an American actress and singer. She won the 1962 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for her role as Martha Vail in the Broadway-theatre production of Subways Are for Sleeping and was nominated twice for the Drama Desk Award. Early life and education Newman was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, the daughter of Rachael, a fortune teller, and Sigmund Newman, a handwriting analyst, both boardwalk workers. Her parents were Eastern European Jewish immigrants. She attended Lincoln High School where she was voted "Future Hollywood Star." Broadway Newman made her Broadway debut in Wish You Were Here in 1952. Additional theater credits include Bells Are Ringing, Pleasures and Palaces, The Apple Tree, On the Town, The Prisoner of Second Avenue, Awake and Sing!, Broadway Bound, and Subways Are for Sleeping, for which she won the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical, beating out Barbra Streisand in I Can Get It for You Wholesale. She was nominated twice for the Drama Desk Award and received a second Tony Award nomination, for Broadway Bound. In June 1979 Newman and Arthur Laurents collaborated on the one-woman show The Madwoman of Central Park West. Produced by Fritz Holt, it featured songs by Leonard Bernstein, Jerry Bock, John Kander, Martin Charnin, Betty Comden, Adolph Green, Edward Kleban, Fred Ebb, Sheldon Harnick, Peter Allen, Barry Manilow, Carole Bayer Sager, and Stephen Sondheim, among others. The show ran for 86 performances at the 22 Steps Theatre in New York City.[4] Television An early television role for Newman was in a 1959 episode of Beverly Garland's crime drama Decoy. In 1960 she was cast as Doris Hudson on the CBS summer replacement series Diagnosis: Unknown, with Patrick O'Neal as the pathologist Dr. Daniel Coffee and Martin Huston as the handyman named Link. Newman became a major television celebrity of the 1960s and 1970s, a frequent panelist on the top-rated network game shows What's My Line?, Match Game and To Tell the Truth and a perennial guest of Johnny Carson's on NBC's The Tonight Show. She portrayed Melissa's mother Elaine on the television series Thirtysomething. She created the role of Renée Buchanan on the ABC soap opera One Life to Live and was a regular on the prime time series 100 Centre Street and the NBC satirical series That Was The Week That Was. Other television credits include The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Burke's Law, ABC Stage 67, Murder, She Wrote, The Wild Wild West. Newman starred in the short-lived comedy about a couple living in an Arizona retirement community, Coming of Age, opposite veteran actors Paul Dooley, Glynis Johns and Alan Young. Film On screen, Newman appeared in Picnic (1955), Let's Rock (1958), Bye Bye Braverman (1968), To Find a Man (1972), Mannequin (1987), Only You (1994), The Beautician and the Beast (1997), A Price Above Rubies (1998) and The Human Stain (2003). Music In addition to her appearances on original cast recordings, Newman recorded an album of contemporary songs, Those Were the Days, for Sire Records in 1968. In England, the album was released as Phyllis Newman's World of Music on London Records. The Phyllis Newman Women's Health Initiative In 1995 Newman founded The Phyllis Newman Women's Health Initiative of the Actors Fund of America. Since then she hosted the annual Nothing Like a Dame galas, which have raised more than US $3.5 million and served 2,500 women in the entertainment industry. In 2009 Newman received the first Isabelle Stevenson Award, a special Tony Award, for her work with the Health Initiative. This award recognizes "an individual from the theatre community for [his or her] humanitarian work." Memoir Her memoir Just in Time – Notes from My Life (1988; Simon & Schuster; ISBN 978-0-671-61880-3), relates her career, life with her husband, lyricist and playwright Adolph Green, and her bout with cancer. Personal life and death Newman was married to lyricist and playwright Adolph Green from 1960 until his death in 2002. She was the mother of journalist Adam Green and singer-songwriter Amanda Green. Newman died on September 15, 2019 at the age of 86 from complications of a lung disorder.

Adolph Green Born December 2, 1914 The Bronx, New York, U.S. Died October 23, 2002 (aged 87) New York City, New York, U.S. Occupation Playwright/Songwriter Years active 1944–2002 Adolph Green (December 2, 1914 – October 23, 2002) was an American lyricist and playwright who, with long-time collaborator Betty Comden, penned the screenplays and songs for some of the most beloved movie musicals, particularly as part of Arthur Freed's production unit at Metro Goldwyn Mayer, during the genre's heyday. Many people thought the pair were married, but in fact they were not a romantic couple at all. Nevertheless, they shared a unique comic genius and sophisticated wit that enabled them to forge a six-decade-long partnership that produced some of Hollywood and Broadway's greatest hits. Biography Green was born in the Bronx to Hungarian Jewish immigrants Helen (née Weiss) and Daniel Green. After high school, he worked as a runner on Wall Street while he tried to make it as an actor. He met Betty Comden 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, who he had met in 1937 at a summer camp where Bernstein was the music counselor, 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 teamed 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 much 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 play 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, an exploration of 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. In 1980, Green was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.[1] And, in 1981, he was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame.[2] In 1989 he appeared as Dr. Pangloss in Bernstein's Candide. Comden and Green received Kennedy Center Honors in 1991. Green's third wife was actress Phyllis Newman, who had understudied Holliday in Bells Are Ringing. They had two children, Adam and Amanda, both of whom are songwriters. His Broadway memorial, with such luminaries as Lauren Bacall, Kevin Kline, Joel Grey, Kristin Chenoweth, Arthur Laurents, Peter Stone, and, of course, Betty Comden in attendance was held at the Shubert Theater on December 4, 2002. Broadway credits These shows are collated from the biography above. A Doll's Life (1982) Die Fledermaus (1954) Peter Pan (1954) Broadway in A Party with Betty Comden and Adolph Green (1958) Bells Are Ringing (1956) Wonderful Town (1953) Two on the Aisle (1951) Bonanza Bound (1947) Billion Dollar Baby (1945) On the Town (1944) Additional Broadway credits[edit] The Will Rogers Follies (1991) Singin' in the Rain (1985) The Madwoman of Central Park West (1979) On the Twentieth Century (1978) Lorelei (1974) Applause (1970) Hallelujah, Baby! (1967) Fade Out – Fade In (1964) Subways Are For Sleeping (1961) Do Re Mi (1960) Say, Darling (1958) Acting credits[edit] Greenwich Village (1944) as Revuer (uncredited) Simon (1980) as Commune Leader My Favorite Year (1982) as Leo Silver Lily in Love (1984) as Jerry Silber I Want to Go Home (1989) as Joey Wellman Candide (1991) (TV) as Dr. Pangloss / Martin Frasier (1994) (TV) as Walter (episode: Burying a Grudge) The Substance of Fire (1996) as Mr. Musselblatt Awards and nominations[edit] Year Award Category Work Result 1950 WGA Award Best Written American Musical The Barkleys of Broadway Nominated On the Town Won 1953 Singin' in the Rain Won New York Drama Critics' Circle Award Best Musical Wonderful Town Won 1954 Academy Awards Best Writing, Story and Screenplay The Band Wagon Nominated WGA Award Best Written American Musical Nominated 1956 Academy Awards Best Writing, Story and Screenplay It's Always Fair Weather Nominated WGA Award Best Written American Musical Nominated 1961 Bells Are Ringing Won Grammy Award Best Soundtrack Album or Recording of Original Cast from a Motion Picture or TV Nominated 1968 Tony Award Best Composer and Lyricist Hallelujah, Baby! Won 1978 Best Book of a Musical On the Twentieth Century Won Best Original Score Won 1983 Best Book of a Musical A Doll's House Nominated Best Original Score Nominated 1986 Best Book of a Musical Singin' in the Rain Nominated 1991 Best Original Score The Will Rogers Follies Won New York Drama Critics' Circle Award Best Musical Won 1995 National Board of Review Award Distinction in Screenwriting Won 2001 WGA Award Laurel Award for Screen Writing Achievement Won