Biography
Though lacking the broad international stature of George Gershwin, Cole Porter, or the partnerships of Rodgers & Hart and Lerner & Loewe outside his native England, Eric Maschwitz nevertheless penned “These Foolish Things,” a number that remains nearly as familiar in the opening years of the twenty-first century—owing to interpretations by the likes of Sam Cooke and Bryan Ferry—as it was throughout the 1930s. Born in 1901 near Birmingham to a Lithuanian immigrant family, he studied at Caius College, Cambridge, and began composing plays and songs while still in his teens. Several modest successes followed in writing for the stage and for the BBC, which he joined in the 1920s, most often in partnership with George Posford and at times with Jack Strachey; he also issued several novels and supplied radio scripts, frequently under the pseudonym Holt Marvell. His 1936 stage musical The Gay Hussar, later retitled Balalaika, reached Hollywood screens by the close of the decade, and that same year he earned an Oscar nomination for co-writing the screenplay of Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939). Together with Strachey and Harry Link, Maschwitz supplied “These Foolish Things” to the revue Spread It Abroad, where it registered as a hit and soon ranked among the decade’s most frequently recorded songs, continuing to attract singers across three generations and appearing in numerous major films along the way. He later collaborated on “A Nightingale Sang in Barkeley Square,” a ballad that became closely identified with wartime England and the early 1940s and that has since been embraced as a pop standard by virtually every leading vocalist of the mid-twentieth century. His theatrical work remained active into the 1950s, one example being Zip Goes a Million, written as a showcase for George Formby and later revived in the new century. Maschwitz continued supplying scripts for radio and television through the 1960s until his death in 1969.