Celebrity Biographies
Joseph Stein
Although Joseph Stein’s life has faded, the music from the works he wrote continues to resonate in the hearts of moviegoers and musical enthusiasts. Whose legs don’t move when he remembers the notes from Fiddler on the Roof and Zorba the Greek ? Stein, writer for both titles, died at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, after a long fight against prostate cancer on October 24, 2010. He was 98 years old.
Born in New York on May 30, 1912, Joseph Stein came from a Jewish family that emigrated from Poland. He grew up in the popular neighborhood of the Bronx, and later received a degree in Social Work from Columbia University. He came to practice as a social worker for a time, until in 1945 he began to write comic plays, which would change his life.
After meeting comic actor Zero Mostel , he got him contracts to work as a radio scriptwriter for great figures of the 1940s, such as Jackie Gleason . Later he became part of the writing team of the television show Your Show of Shows , where he also later began his career Woody Allen .
But the field in which Stein was destined to succeed was that of Broadway musicals. He debuted by contributing skits to the 1948 Lend and Ear show . A friend asked him if he could write a musical like Oklahoma! , from Rodgers and Hammerstein, but over Pennsylvania. It seemed like a very good idea to him, and along with his partner, Will Glickman, also a writer, spent some time visiting the Amish community of Lancaster County. Out of this experience came the play Play and Fancy , which opened on Broadway in 1955 to great success.
Soon after, Stein made a splash when he wrote Fiddler on the Roof , which was inspired by a short story by Sholem Aleichem, and starred his friend Zero Mostel as Tevye the milkman. The production won three Tony Awards: best musical, score and book. Stein was also hired to write the screenplay for the memorable film adaptation.
His other big hit was Zorba the Greek , with lyrics by Fred Ebb and music by John Kander . Anthony Quinn played the lead on stage –in a revival– and in the film version.
After the death of his first wife, Sadie – with whom he had three children – Stein married Elisa Loti , a Manhattan psychologist who accompanied him until his death, and with whom he had a daughter. “He was a very funny man and distracted people from the hospital,” explains Elisa Stein.