Eric Maschwitz

Eric Maschwitz is not (outside of his native England, at least) a universally renowned songwriter in the manner of George Gershwin, Cole Porter, or the teams of Rodgers & Hart or Lerner & Loewe, but he did write one song, "These Foolish Things," that is nearly as well known in the first decade of the 21st century -- thanks to recordings of it by the likes of Sam Cooke and Bryan Ferry -- as it was in the 1930s. Born in England near Birmingham in 1901 to a Lithuanian immigrant family, Maschwitz attended Caius College, Cambridge, and began writing plays and songs while in his teens. He enjoyed several modest successes as a composer and writer for the stage and also for the BBC (which he joined in the 1920s), principally in collaboration with George Posford and occasionally with Jack Strachey, in addition to publishing several novels and authoring radio scripts, often using the pseudonym Holt Marvell. His 1936 musical The Gay Hussar, later retitled Balalaika, was transported from the London stage to Hollywood at the end of the decade, and Maschwitz also earned an Oscar nomination for his co-authoring of the script for Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939). In 1936, he and Strachey and Harry Link co-wrote "These Foolish Things" for a revue entitled Spread It Abroad, where it became established as a hit and from which it went on to become one of the most recorded songs of the decade, enduring decade after decade, interpreted by three generations of singers and also incorporated into several major movies, among other appearances. Maschwitz also later co-wrote "A Nightingale Sang in Barkeley Square," which became deeply evocative of wartime England and the early '40s, and has enjoyed a considerable life of its own as a pop standard in the hands of virtually every major singer of the mid-20th century. His stage successes continued into the 1950s, with one of them -- Zip Goes a Million, written as a vehicle for George Formby -- receiving a revival in the new century. He wrote radio and television scripts into the 1960s, and passed away in 1969. ~ Bruce Eder