Remembering Oscar Levant on his birthday 🎂
📷 Jack Woods, on the set of Michael Curtiz's Romance on the High Seas, 1948
"My last picture for Warners was Romance on the High Seas. It was Doris Day's first picture; that was before she became a virgin."
- The Memoirs of an Amnesiac
Aaron Copland & Oscar Levant laugh it up at a Leonard Bernstein party, photographed by Stanley Kubrick in 1949 for Look magazine
@MuseumofCityNY
I adore this shot!
“Schoenberg, who pretended to a certain omniscience, once said to me in his trembling husky voice, ‘I can see through walls.’”
- Oscar Levant, from his hugely entertaining (but very sad) auto-biography The Memoirs of an Amnesiac
Another shot of Aaron Copland & Oscar Levant by Stanley Kubrick. You know Oscar can't sustain joy for more than a minute or so.
"I would like to have been present, if I could have my choice of all moments in music history, when Stokowski suddenly became conscious of his beautiful hands. That must have been a moment."
- Oscar Levant
📷 Erich Auerbach, 1961
Oscar Levant & Nina Foch in a wonderful scene from An American in Paris.
Oscar Levant by Richard Avedon, Beverly Hills, April 12, 1972.
Avedon said this was the most powerful sitting he had ever experienced. Oscar died in August of that year. Death comes to all of us, even the hypochondriacs.
#PhoneCallFromPaul tweet on Oscar Levant's birthday
Dan Castellaneta as Levant in his play "For Harpo and Piano", Falcon Theater, Los Angeles, 2017
Paul @holdengraber talks with interesting people
lithub.com/?s=phone+call+…
@lithub @CallFromPaul
"There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line."
- Oscar Levant
📷 CBS, 1949
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