Albert Hague, 81; ‘Fame’ Teacher Wrote Scores for Broadway, TV

Albert Hague, a refugee from Nazi Germany who became a Tony-winning Broadway composer and then a familiar TV presence in the series “Fame,” has died. He was 81.

Hague died Monday of cancer at Daniel Freeman Medical Center in Marina del Rey.

“I’m living proof that America works,” Hague wrote for an unpublished autobiography. “Here I was, an 18-year-old kid, all alone in a foreign country, not speaking a word of English, without two pennies to rub together. Sixteen years later, I celebrated the opening night of my first Broadway hit.”

That 1955 show, “Plain and Fancy,” was set in Amish country and featured Barbara Cook and the hit song “Young and Foolish.” It was followed in 1959 by Hague’s Tony-winning score for “Redhead,” a musical murder mystery set in Victorian London, starring Gwen Verdon.

Hague wrote the score for the 1966 TV show “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” which became a holiday perennial.

His later stage musicals weren’t successful. “The Fig Leaves Are Falling” closed on Broadway within three days of opening in January 1969. “Miss Moffat,” a Bette Davis vehicle in 1974, closed outside New York.

In the 1960s, Hague began teaching classes in how to audition for musical theater.

“He absolutely opened up my whole vision of how to approach a song,” said actress Lynn Redgrave, one of his students. “That helped my acting immeasurably, not only for singing but for spoken word as well.”

His work as a teacher proved to be valuable training for the new career that Hague began in 1980, when he appeared as Professor Shorofsky, the music teacher at a performing arts high school in the movie “Fame.” However, Hague himself refused to audition for the role--or for any other role, he later said.

“I tell my agent to tell them that I’m too damned temperamental,” Hague told People magazine. “I will talk to them and discuss what I should do . . . but auditioning implies that I’m a trained actor, and I’m not.”

After playing the role of the white-bearded teacher with a German accent in the movie, he played the same character in the “Fame” TV series, for a year on NBC and then for four more years in a syndicated version. The TV role brought him to Los Angeles.

“He was such a wise, young old soul,” said Debbie Allen, who played a dance teacher on the TV series. “Such a gentle, jovial person.”

Hague appeared in the movie “Space Jam” in 1996. In his later years, he and his wife, Broadway actress Renee Orin, performed a cabaret act that played the Cinegrill in Hollywood and Carnegie Hall in New York.

Orin met Hague in 1948, when she was in his first musical, “The Reluctant Lady,” in Ohio. They had been married 49 years when she died in 2000.

Hague was born Albert Marcuse in 1920 in Berlin. Although his family was Jewish, he was raised as a Lutheran in an attempt to protect him from anti-Semitism. His Lutheran identity on his passport helped him leave Germany in 1937. He later resumed the practice of Judaism.

After he attended a conservatory in Rome, an aunt in Ohio arranged for Hague to receive a music scholarship at the University of Cincinnati. He arrived in America in 1939, intending to become a concert pianist. Soon he was adopted by Elliott B. Hague, an eye surgeon and benefactor of the university. After graduating in 1942, the budding musician served in the U.S. Army for more than two years.

He is survived by two children, Janet Hague of Portland, Ore., and Andrew Hague of New York.

A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. Sunday at Hillside Memorial Park in Culver City.