Oscar Levant

Oscar Levant was born in Pittsburgh in 1906 and studied piano from childhood, moving to New York as a teenager to pursue a concert career. He later studied composition with Arnold Schoenberg and Joseph Schillinger, and he became a close friend and devoted champion of George Gershwin, whose Rhapsody in Blue and Concerto in F became staples of his repertoire. His Gershwin recordings made him one of the best-selling classical pianists in America.

Levant was also a working composer. In the late 1920s and 1930s he wrote popular songs, including the standard "Blame It on My Youth," and composed music for Hollywood films. Nothing Sacred (1937), the screwball satire starring Carole Lombard and Fredric March, carries his music. He also wrote a piano concerto and other concert works.

But Levant was most famous as a personality. His lightning-fast, self-deprecating wit made him a star of the radio quiz show Information Please, and he wrote witty memoirs such as A Smattering of Ignorance. On screen he played versions of himself, usually a wisecracking pianist, in Rhapsody in Blue, Humoresque, The Barkleys of Broadway and An American in Paris, where a famous fantasy sequence shows him as soloist, conductor, orchestra and audience all at once.

In later years Levant struggled with anxiety, depression and dependence on prescription drugs, though he remained a sharp-tongued television host. He died in Beverly Hills in 1972.