Lawrence Holofcener

Lawrence Holofcener (February 23, 1926 – March 4, 2017) was an American-British performer, playwright, lyricist, sculptor, poet, novelist, and director who held dual citizenship in the United States and the United Kingdom. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, to Edward A. and Lillian S. (Stulman) Holofcener, he pursued careers across multiple disciplines over the course of his life.

Holofcener studied at the University of Maryland and the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he met composer Jerry Bock. The two collaborated on songs for Big as Life and for Your Show of Shows, the television program featuring Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, and Carl Reiner. Their partnership extended to Broadway, where they wrote the stage scores for Mr. Wonderful and Catch a Star. Holofcener joined ASCAP in 1956, and his songwriting credits include "Too Close for Comfort," "Without You I'm Nothing," "Raining, It's Raining," and "The Story of Alice," the last of which was recorded by the Chad Mitchell Trio.

His acting career began in a nightclub revue at Upstairs at the Downstairs in New York. His first Broadway acting credit came in Stop the World – I Want to Get Off, followed in 1964 by the role of Cornelius in Hello, Dolly!, in which he performed opposite both Carol Channing and Ginger Rogers. That same year he appeared on Broadway in Before You Go, a play he also wrote, which subsequently received productions in regional theaters in the United Kingdom, Paris, Sweden, and Mexico City. His musical play I Don't Live There Anymore, written with composer Gerard Kenny, received its American premiere at the 1993 Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, South Carolina. Beyond the stage, Holofcener appeared in the 1981 television film Thin Ice, starring Kate Jackson, and in the film Walking and Talking, written and directed by his daughter Nicole Holofcener.

Holofcener maintained an active literary career alongside his work in theater. In 1960 he compiled and edited A Practical Dictionary of Rhymes for Crown Publishers. He wrote Day of Change in 1976, and his British-English dictionary, Britishisms, was first published in 1981.

His work as a sculptor began with a 1979 exhibition at the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, South Carolina. In 1985, Laurence Olivier unveiled Holofcener's portrait "Faces of Olivier" at the Chichester Festival Theatre, and exactly ten years later Princess Margaret unveiled his dual portraits of Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt on Bond Street in London. That work, titled "Allies," became a recognized London landmark. Among his other commissions were a sculpture of Queen Victoria for the Isle of Wight's Museum of Island History and for Coburg, Germany, a life-size bronze of Thomas Paine at Bordentown, New Jersey, and life-size portraits of Thomas Chatterton, William Tyndale, and William Penn in Bristol, England. In 1998 he began a series of portraits honoring twentieth-century figures including Albert Einstein, John F. Kennedy, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, Frank Sinatra, Muhammad Ali, Mahatma Gandhi, Anne Frank, Eleanor Roosevelt, Leonard Bernstein, Albert Schweitzer, the Three Tenors, and John Lennon.

Holofcener was married first to Carol Joffe, with whom he had two daughters, Suzanne Holofcener and director Nicole Holofcener; that marriage ended in divorce in 1961. He later married Julia Cornforth. He died in March 2017 at the age of 91.