Today marks the 106th anniversary of the birth of Moss Hart, writer, director, and the virtuoso behind many a classic story; some of which became musicals beloved of the habitués of Dolores Delargo Towers.
Mr Hart was a strange and contradictory character. More or less an out-gay man in the theatrical world of the 1930s, he nevertheless married the glamorous fashionista and actress Kitty Carlisle (what gay man wouldn't?), and they had two children together.
It was for his writing genius, however, that he will be most remembered. Collaborating with George Kaufman he wrote The Man Who Came To Dinner (later a star vehicle for Bette Davis and the outrageously camp Monty Woolley). With Woolley's friend and lover Cole Porter (with whom Mr Hart spent a four and a half month luxury cruise in 1935!) he produced the musical Jubilee! (from which came such standards as Begin the Beguine and Just One Of Those Things). He collaborated with Irving Berlin, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart (no relation), Kurt Weill and Ira Gershwin.
But his crowning glory was another collaboration, this time with Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, on an adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion. In their hands it became one of the best-loved musicals of them all...
And so we laud the magnificence of Moss Hart through his opus My Fair Lady:
Moss Hart on IBDB
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