Steve Lawrence

Steve Lawrence, born Sidney Liebowitz on July 8, 1935, in Brooklyn, New York, was an American singer, comedian, and actor whose career spanned more than six decades. His father, Max, served as a cantor at the Brooklyn synagogue Beth Sholom Tomchei Harav, and his mother, Helen, was a homemaker. Lawrence attended Thomas Jefferson High School, where he regularly skipped classes to visit the Brill Building in pursuit of a singing career. He died on March 7, 2024, in Los Angeles, from complications of Alzheimer's disease, which he had publicly disclosed in June 2019. He was 88 years old and is interred beside his wife at Hillside Memorial Park Cemetery in Culver City, California.

At sixteen, Lawrence won a talent contest on Arthur Godfrey's CBS television program and subsequently signed a recording contract with King Records in 1952. The following year, Steve Allen hired him as a vocalist on a local late-night program on WNBC-TV, alongside Eydie Gormé and Andy Williams. When NBC expanded the broadcast nationally as The Tonight Show, Lawrence remained with the program until it concluded in 1957. He later credited Allen's show as the pivotal launching point of his career, noting that the nightly demand to perform something different provided training he compared favorably to vaudeville. In the late 1950s, Lawrence was drafted into the U.S. Army and served as the official vocal soloist with the United States Army Band "Pershing's Own" in Washington, D.C.

Lawrence achieved considerable chart success in the late 1950s and early 1960s. His singles included "Party Doll," which reached number five on the U.S. charts, "Pretty Blue Eyes" at number nine, "Footsteps" at number seven, "Portrait of My Love" at number nine, and "Go Away Little Girl," which reached number one and sold over one million copies, earning a Gold record. Despite this pop success, much of his musical career was rooted in nightclubs and the theatrical stage.

His Broadway career extended from 1947 to 1968 and included appearances in The Dream Girl and What Makes Sammy Run?, as well as a starring role in Golden Rainbow. In 1964, Lawrence played Sammy Glick in What Makes Sammy Run?, a musical centered on an ambitious young man's rise through Hollywood, which ran for 540 performances at the 54th Street Theater. The role earned him both a Tony Award nomination for Best Actor in a Musical and a New York Drama Critics' Circle Award nomination. Lawrence and Gormé appeared together in Golden Rainbow, which ran from February 1968 to January 1969. The production featured the song "I've Gotta Be Me," which Lawrence performed at the close of the first act; Sammy Davis Jr. later recorded a version that reached number eleven on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 in 1969. The production is documented in William Goldman's 1968 book The Season.

Lawrence and Gormé first performed together as regulars on Tonight Starring Steve Allen in 1954 and continued as a duo until Gormé's retirement in 2009. They married on December 29, 1957, at the El Rancho Vegas in Las Vegas, Nevada. The couple had two sons: David Nessim Lawrence, born in 1960, is an ASCAP Award-winning composer whose credits include the score for High School Musical; Michael Robert Lawrence, born in 1962, died at age 23 from ventricular fibrillation caused by an undiagnosed heart condition. At the time of Michael's death, Lawrence and Gormé were in Atlanta, having performed at the Fox Theatre the night before. Frank Sinatra sent his private plane to bring the couple to New York to be with their surviving son, David. Following Michael's death, the couple took a year away from touring. Eydie Gormé died on August 10, 2013, at age 84. David Lawrence subsequently developed a tribute show to his parents titled A Toast to Steve and Eydie.

Lawrence and Gormé starred together in the 1958 summer replacement series The Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé Show. The Steve Lawrence Show, featuring supporting actor Charles Nelson Reilly, ran for thirteen weeks in 1965 and was among the later television variety programs to air in black and white. Lawrence made 29 appearances on The Carol Burnett Show and served as a panelist on What's My Line? Lawrence's television acting credits included guest roles on The Danny Kaye Show, The Judy Garland Show, Night Gallery, The Flip Wilson Show, Police Story, Murder She Wrote, Diagnosis: Murder, CSI, Hardcastle and McCormick, The Nanny, Hot in Cleveland, and Two and a Half Men. In 2014, he also sang the theme song for the parody miniseries The Spoils of Babylon.

His film work included the role of Gary McBride in the 1972 film Stand Up and Be Counted, and the featured role of Maury Sline, manager and friend of the main characters, in the 1980 film The Blues Brothers, a role he reprised in the 1998 sequel Blues Brothers 2000. Additional film credits include The Lonely Guy in 1984, an appearance alongside Gormé in Irwin Allen's 1985 television film adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, in which they played Tweedledum and Tweedledee respectively, and The Yards in 2000. In 1984, Lawrence and comedian Don Rickles co-hosted ABC's Foul-Ups, Bleeps & Blunders.

Among the honors Lawrence and Gormé received together were two Emmy Award nominations, with a win in 1979 for Outstanding Comedy-Variety or Music Program for Steve & Eydie Celebrate Irving Berlin. The duo also received a Grammy Award for Best Performance by a Vocal Duo or Group for We Got Us, a Film Advisory Board Award of Excellence, a Television Critics Circle Award for From This Moment On, and the Las Vegas Entertainment Award for Musical Variety Act of the Year on four occasions, three of them consecutively. They were honored with a lifetime achievement award from the Songwriters Hall of Fame and received the Ella Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of Singers in 1995.