Mary Rodgers, who has died aged 83, was a composer and songwriter whose 1959 musical Once Upon a Mattress, based on a Hans Christian Andersen story, The Princess and the Pea, is played constantly throughout America. She was part of a line of musical theatre composers: Richard Rodgers, of Rodgers and Hammerstein, was her father, and her son Adam Guettel is now in the business.
She never repeated the early success of Once Upon a Mattress, but wrote many songs with her great friend Stephen Sondheim, with whom she more or less grew up, before switching to children's fiction and writing a bestseller, Freaky Friday (1972), which spawned two body-swap movies in which mother and daughter trade places. The roles were played in 1976 by Barbara Harris and Jodie Foster, and in 2003 by Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan.
Continue reading...