Squirrel Hill native who taught piano to Hollywood stars
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Margie Balter, the Pittsburgh-born musician once dubbed “Hollywood’s Piano Teacher to the Stars,” died Tuesday in Los Angeles at 67 after a battle with cancer.
Ms. Balter was a Squirrel Hill native and WinchesterThurston graduate who dreamed of being an actress and even started a theater company, called “The Playwrights,” in fourth grade.
“They used to go around performing at kids’ parties,” said her sister Joni Balter, of Seattle, adding that, “Margie was an irrepressible optimist … the bright light in everyone’s life if you were lucky enough to know her.”
Performing was in their blood, as their grandmother was a singer and trumpet player, and an older cousin, Aline MacMahon, was nominated for a 1944 Academy Award for supporting work in “’Dragon Seed.”
Acting didn’t pan out for Ms. Balter, but music did. She had started formal piano lessons at age 4 eventually studied with jazz legend Nathan Davis at the University of Pittsburgh. After a year at Northwestern University to focus on theater, she moved to Seattle to study ethnomusicology at the University of Washington.
She played marimba and danced in the Seattle-based Dumi and the Minanzi Marimba Ensemble, which performed at the Kennedy Center and opened for such artists as Taj Mahal, Grover Washington and The Neville Brothers.
Soon after landing in Hollywood in 1979, Ms. Balter began teaching Jane Fonda’s son, Troy Garity. A decade later, she was hired to coach Holly Hunter for the haunting role in Jane Campion’s “The Piano,” and the actress would mention her while accepting her Golden Globe. From there, she worked with Barbara Hershey on Ms. Campion’s “Portrait of a Lady,” Tom Cruise for “Interview With the Vampire,” Kevin Spacey for “Beyond the Sea” and Greg Kinnear for “The Last Song,” among others. She also supervised some flute lessons for Al Pacino for his turn as Jack Kevorkian in an HBO movie.
“I think my strength as a piano teacher is I’m not,” she told the Post-Gazette in 1994. “My real talent is as an actress. Every mistake every piano student makes, I’ve already made and had to figure out how to fix it. That’s really what’s made me a good piano teacher.”
As a composer, she wrote the score for the sci-fi thriller “Lightspeed,” a song for the 1988 Olympics and another for the Tina Fey-Steve Carell comedy “Date Night.” They were compiled on her 2007 CD “Music from the Heart.”
“It’s like film music, a little jazzy, a little classical, all very emotional,” she told the PG. “I like that I’m under category of New Age, because they’re more open than anything else.”
She also did a one-woman show called “Music, Dreams And Movies” and was a member of the improv comedy troupe The Lunatics for 10 years.
Joni Balter, who moved to Seattle to be closer to her sister, said, “She was the person who would hold your hand when you were frightened. She was the one who said, ‘Don’t be intimidated. We can do this. We can do all of it.’ ”
Ms. Balter is survived by her longtime partner, Roger Mende; mother, Alma Balter of Los Angeles; sister, Joni Balter, and brother-inlaw, Timothy Egan, of Seattle; brother sister-inlaw, Robert and Margery Balter of Philadelphia; and nieces and nephews Sophie and Casey Egan Meredith and Kevin Croy.
The funeral is at noon Friday at Rodef Shalom, 4905 Fifth Ave., Oakland. Burial is at Temple B’Nai Israel in White Oak. The family will meet with other attendees at 11 a.m. A second memorial in her honor will be held in Los Angeles featuring her music and that of her piano prodigies.