Oscar Hammerstein II was an American playwright and songwriter known for his work on musicals. He won a Pulitzer Prize and two Academy Awards, and collaborated with Richard Rodgers on many famous musicals including Oklahoma!, The King and I, and The Sound of Music. He died in 1960.
Oscar Hammerstein II was an American playwright and songwriter who worked primarily on musicals. He was born in New York in 1885 and died in 1960 at the age of 65. During his lifetime he won a Pulitzer Prize and two Academy Awards, making him the only person named Oscar to ever win an Academy Award.
Oscar Hammerstein the Younger’s father was a prominent man in the theatre, and from a young age little Oscar was surrounded by the world of the theatre. His grandfather, Oscar Hammerstein I, was one of vaudeville’s great innovators, best known for inventing the pie-in-the-face gag. William Hammerstein, the father of young Oscar, ran the Victoria Theater for his father and wanted Oscar out of the family business.
An obedient son, Oscar Hammerstein followed his father’s wishes and attended Columbia University to study law. When his father died in 1914, however, he felt free to pursue a life in the theater and began taking part in local plays. Eventually he dropped out of law school altogether to pursue theater full-time. He forged bonds with established figures on Broadway and began an apprenticeship that would eventually lead to his first musical, Always You, in 1921.
Over the next several years Oscar Hammerstein collaborated with several Broadway personalities, usually writing the book for their musicals. In 1927 he worked on Show Boat, one of his most famous early musicals. Show Boat featured a hallmark of Oscar Hammerstein and one of his great contributions to musical theatre. Rather than constructing songs and routines that seemed to stand on top of the show itself, he created pieces that flowed seamlessly from the actual plot of the story and the actions and feelings the characters were experiencing.
During this early period of extensive collaboration he also worked on Wildflower, Very Warm for May, Rose Marie, The Desert Song, The New Moon and Sweet Adeline. While none of these shows were as popular as later issues would be, they helped cement his reputation as one of Broadway’s great writers.
In the early 1940s Oscar Hammerstein teamed up with Richard Rodgers to help him adapt a play, Green Grow the Lilacs. The two worked together incredibly well, and the resulting musical, titled Oklahoma! took Broadway by storm. Rodgers and Hammerstein would go on to create many of Broadway’s quintessential musicals, including Carousel, The King and I, The Sound of Music, and South Pacific.
Oscar Hammerstein won a 1950 Pulitzer Prize for his South Pacific, which was an adaptation of James Michener’s 1948 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Tales of the South Pacific. He also won an Academy Award for the song “The Last Time I Saw Paris” by Lady Be Good and “It Might As Well Be Spring” by State Fair.
Oscar Hammerstein died in 1960, soon after The Sound of Music was released on Broadway. The play would become a major hit on Broadway and lead to a film adaptation in 1965 that would be Hammerstein’s most enduring legacy.
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