Lawrence Holofcener –
Renaissance Man
Former Island resident Lawrence (Larry) Holofcener died on Saturday March 4th 2017
at his home in Florida, just over a week after his 91st birthday. Famous in later life for his
amazing life-size sculptures of famous historical figures, Lawrence and his wife Julia had
a home in Bembridge for many years and even after moving back to the States to be near
family, they returned most summers to visit friends on the Island. By Jo Macaulay.
The Holofceners recently
gifted Lawrence’s bronze bas-
relief of Lawrence Olivier in
24 different roles to the Apollo
Theatre in Newport, which is to
be hung in the foyer shortly.
In fact the theatre was his first love, and
he was a successful songwriter - penning
‘Mr. Wonderful’, the title music used for
the Godfather Mark II – as well as a singer
and author who wrote the Broadway
stage scores for the musicals ‘Mr.
Wonderful’ and ‘Catch a Star’.
Born in Baltimore, Lawrence Holofcener
attended the University of Maryland and
the University of Wisconsin–Madison
where he met and performed with Jerry
Bock, and the pair went on to write
songs for ‘Big As Life’ and ‘Your Show of
Shows’, starring greats such as Sid Caesar,
Imogene Coca and Carl Reiner.
In 1968, Lawrence wrote the play
‘Before You Go’, a Broadway comedy that
led to an acting career in such hits as
‘Hello, Dolly!,’ with Carol Channing and
Ginger Rogers. He made his debut on
Broadway in ‘Stop the World, I Want to
Get Off.’
It was whilst waiting around in the
wings after taking the role of Professor
Henry Higgins in ‘My Fair Lady’, with
the Charleston Light Opera Guild in the
summer of 1978, that Lawrence decided
to try his hand at sculpture. He walked
into the Gibbes Museum of Art and asked
a woman at the desk where he could
buy clay and tools, and she answered by
offering him a job as a teacher, which he
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accepted. The rest, as they say, is history.
Lawrence’s statue of Winston Churchill
and Franklin D Roosevelt sitting on a
bench, named ‘The Allies’ is one of his
best-known works, and a cast of the
sculpture was unveiled by Princess
Margaret in New Bond Street in 1995
to commemorate 50 years of peace.
Another cast of this statue sits next to
the Priory Bay Hotel in St Helen’s, where
guests love to pose for photos between
the two great men, just as they do in New
Bond Street.
His bronze of the Young Mr. Churchill
entitled ‘In Conversation’ was unveiled
on November 28th, 2012, at London’s
Hyatt Regency Hotel, where the great
statesman sits on the Churchill Bar
Terrace with a glass of brandy and a cigar.
Lawrence gifted a cast of his life-size
sculpture of the young Shakespeare
to Stratford, and he unveiled it on his
90th birthday in the spring of 2016.
The bronze of the Bard standing with