Mary Rodgers was born in Manhattan, New York on January 11, 1931. She attended Wellesley College, where she studied music, but she left before graduating to get married. While at Wellesley, she wrote numerous songs. A dozen were published in 1952 under the title Some of My Best Friends Are Children. In 1957, she met composer Leonard Bernstein, who hired her to help write and produce the television shows of Bernstein's New York Philharmonic Young People's Concerts, a job she held for more than a decade.
She wrote the music for Once Upon a Mattress, Hot Spot, and the off Broadway revue, The Mad Show. She also wrote a musical for television entitled Feathertop. She wrote children's books including Freaky Friday, A Billion for Boris, The Rotten Book, and Summer Switch. Freaky Friday was adapted into a movie starring Barbara Harris and Jodie Foster in 1976 and a remake movie starring Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan in 2003. She died of heart failure on June 26, 2014 at the age 83.
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