Broadway lyricist Betty Comden, who collaborated with Adolph Green on New York stage hits such as On the Town and Singin' in the Rain, has died.

Comden died Thursday of heart failure at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, said her longtime lawyer and executor Ronald Konecky. She was 89.

Betty Comden, shown in 2003, collaborated with Adolph Green for more than 60 years to create the lyrics to hits such as On the Town and Singin' in the Rain.
(Gino Domenico/Associated Press)

"She was, in all respects, a very beautiful and legendary person," Konecky said.

"She was a dynamic figure in the arts, theatre and film."

Comden and Green wrote lyrics and often the book — a term for the script of a musical — for more than a dozen Broadway shows.

They worked with composers Leonard Bernstein, Jule Styne and Cy Coleman and built musicals around stars such as Judy Holliday, Phil Silvers, Carol Burnett and Lauren Bacall.

The couple were never married to each other, but worked together for 60 years. Green died in October 2002 at age 87.

They won five Tony Awards for Wonderful Town, Hallelujah, Baby! and Applause, which took the top Tony for best musical. The duo received the Kennedy Center honours in 1991.

"It's a kind of radar," Comden once said of her partnership with Green.

"We don't divide the work up, taking different scenes. We sit in the same room always."

"I used to write things down in shorthand. I now sit at the typewriter ... Adolph paces more. A lot of people don't believe this but at the end of the day we usually don't remember who thought up what."

Their collaboration spawned the brash, buoyant lyrics of New York, New York — the version that says "New York, New York, it's a helluva town, the Bronx is up and the Battery's down."

They also had several simple, heartfelt pop hits such as Just in Time and Make Someone Happy.

The Revuers

Green, a struggling actor, met Comden in 1938, when she was studying at New York University.

They began writing together after forming a troupe called the Revuers, which performed in the Village Vanguard, a club in Greenwich Village. Among the actors was a young Judy Holliday.

They went to Hollywood in 1947 to write for MGM, penning the screenplay for Good News and for the film version of On the Town, starring Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly, which went on to be a hit.

In 1952, they wrote the screenplay for Singin' in the Rain and in 1953 had another hit with The Band Wagon.

In 1953, Comden and Green headed back to Broadway to work with Bernstein on Wonderful Town.

They went on to augment the score for the 1954 Broadway version of Peter Pan starring Mary Martin and wrote Bells Are Ringing specifically for Holliday and Do Re Mi for Silvers.

They wrote the book, but not the lyrics for Applause, which starred Bacall.

Their longest-running show, The Will Rogers Follies, opening in 1991, was a Ziegfeld-style retelling of the life of the famous humourist.

In 1998, Comden and Green were still working, contributing to a Broadway revival of On the Town and streamlining the script for Die Fledermaus for the Metropolitan Opera.

Comden told her story in her 1995 memoir, Off Stage.

She was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1917, the daughter of a lawyer and a schoolteacher.   

Comden married accessories designer Steven Kyle in 1942 and they had two children. He died in 1979.

She is survived by a daughter, Susanna, but her son, Alan, died in 1990.

With files from the Associated Press