For a few years starting in 1973, Mr. Hamlisch spent practically as much time accepting awards for his compositions as he did writing them. He is one of a handful of artists to win every major creative prize, some of them numerous times, including an Oscar for “The Way We Were” (1973, shared with the lyricists Marilyn and Alan Bergman), a Grammy as best new artist (1974), and a Tony and a Pulitzer for “A Chorus Line” (1975, shared with the lyricist Edward Kleban, the director Michael Bennett and the book writers James Kirkwood Jr. and Nicholas Dante). His omnipresence on awards and talk shows made him one of the last in a line of celebrity composers that included Henry Mancini, Burt Bacharach and Stephen Sondheim._____
Mr. Hamlisch, bespectacled and somewhat gawky, could often appear as the stereotypical music school nerd — in fact, at 7, he was the youngest student to be accepted at the Juilliard School — but his appearance belied his intelligence and easy banter with the likes of Johnny Carson and Merv Griffin. And his melodies were sure-footed and sometimes swashbuckling. “One,” from “A Chorus Line,” with its punchy, brassy lines, distills the essence of the Broadway showstopper. The show started as a series of taped workshops with Broadway dancers, then evolved into a show that opened at the Public Theater in 1975 and moved to Broadway later that year. It ran for 6,137 performances, the most of any Broadway musical until it was surpassed by “Cats.”
Film critic Judith Crist, 90, has died after a long illness, according to her son, Steven Crist. Steven Crist has written extensively on horse racing.
Crist was occasionally banned from advance screenings, while studios and theaters would threaten to pull advertising. When her "Cleopatra" review brought her a prize from the New York Newspaper Women's Club, officials at 20th Century Fox, which released the movie, withdrew from the ceremony._____
Preminger, whose "Hurry Sundown" she called the "worst film" she had seen in memory, referred to her as "Judas Crist." After she condemned Billy Wilder's cross-dressing classic "Some Like It Hot" for its "perverse" gags and "homosexual `in' joke(s)," Wilder allegedly remarked that asking her to review your movie was like "asking the Boston strangler to massage your neck."
But Crist had many friends in the business, from Bette Davis to "Cleopatra" director Joseph Mankiewicz. She ran a film festival for decades out of suburban Tarrytown, N.Y., with guests including Robert Redford, Paul Newman and Steven Spielberg. Woody Allen liked her well enough to give her a cameo in his 1980 drama "Stardust Memories," widely believed to have been based in part on Crist's Tarrytown gatherings.
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