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Born

  • June 29, 1910
  • New York, NY

Died

  • July 28, 1969
  • New York, NY

Full Name

  • Frank Henry Loesser

Frank Loesser

Frank Loesser was one of the top Hollywood and Broadway songwriters during the late 1940s and into the early 1960s. Born in New York City in 1910, Loesser was self-taught in piano and harmonica. He graduated from high school but dropped out of City College in 1926 at age 16 and worked a series of odd jobs. While attending a Lions Club dinner one night he wrote some silly couplets as part of the entertainment. Other members encouraged him to continue writing. He sold his first song, ''Armful of You,'' for $15.00 to a vaudevillian.

Loesser later worked for the Leo Feist Music Publishing Company before taking a job with RKO in 1932. None of his work ever reached the screen, and he soon left to became a nightclub singer. In 1936 Loesser teamed up with composer Irving Actman to write most of the score for a revue called The Illustrator's Show, which only ran for five days at New York's 48th Street Theater. Those five days were enough, however, to convince a scout from Universal Pictures to hand Loesser a contract.

Loesser moved to California, but his new job didn't last long. He went home to New York but returned to Hollywood in 1937, this time to Paramount, where he stayed for four years, writing lyrics for such films as the Bob Hope comedy Thanks for the Memory, the Bing Crosby film Sing You Sinners and the classic Destry Rides Again.

Loesser worked with many other composers during his second stay in Hollywood, but with the start of WWII he began composing music on his own. A Private First Class during the war, he worked in the Army's Special Services Division, supplying sketches and songs for all-soldier revues. In 1946 he was discharged and returned to Hollywood. Loesser's last screen musical was 1952's Hans Christian Anderson, starring Danny Kaye.

In 1948 Loesser produced the score for the Broadway smash hit Where's Charley? In 1950 he found even greater success on Broadway with Guys and Dolls, which ran over 1,200 performances. In 1956 his stage musical The Most Happy Fella opened on Broadway, and in 1961 he scored another hit with How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize. Frank Loesser died on June 28, 1969, at the age of 59, a victim of cigarettes.