In collaboration with Frederick Loewe, and later Burton Lane, he created some of the world's most popular and enduring works of musical theatre both for the stage and on film.

Instead he wrote radio scripts, including Your Hit Parade, until he was introduced to German-Austrian composer Frederick Loewe, who needed a partner, in 1942 at the Lamb's Club.

[4] Lerner and Loewe's first collaboration was a musical adaptation of Barry Conners's farce The Patsy called Life of the Party for a Detroit stock company.

It enjoyed a nine-week run and encouraged the duo to join forces with Arthur Pierson for What's Up?, which opened on Broadway in 1943.

While the show ran for nearly a year and included songs that later became pop standards, such as "They Call the Wind Maria", it was less successful than Lerner's previous work.

In that same year Lerner also wrote the Oscar-winning original screenplay for An American in Paris, produced by Arthur Freed and directed by Vincente Minnelli.

Lerner and Loewe's adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion retained his social commentary and added appropriate songs for the characters of Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle, played originally by Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews.

When brought to the screen in 1964, the movie version won eight Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Rex Harrison.

The Lerner-Loewe partnership cracked under the stress of producing the Arthurian Camelot in 1960, with Loewe resisting Lerner's desire to direct as well as write when original director Moss Hart suffered a heart attack in the last few months of rehearsals and died about a year after the show's Broadway premiere.

[9] Loewe retired to Palm Springs, California, while Lerner went through a series of musicals—some successful, some not—with such composers as André Previn (Coco), John Barry (Lolita, My Love), Leonard Bernstein (1600 Pennsylvania Avenue), Burton Lane (Carmelina) and Charles Strouse (Dance a Little Closer, based on the film, Idiot's Delight, nicknamed Close A Little Faster by Broadway humorists because it closed on opening night).

The following year they collaborated on a musical film version of The Little Prince, based on the classic children's tale by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

[citation needed] Lerner's autobiography, The Street Where I Live (1978), was an account of three of his and Loewe's successful collaborations, My Fair Lady, Gigi, and Camelot, along with personal information.

The Los Angeles Times reviewer wrote: "There are several reasons why this book makes a fine introduction to musical theater.

One is that Lerner knows exactly what was new, and when and why....In "The Musical Theatre," one is privy to the judgment of a man... who expresses his opinions in a forthright, warm and personal manner.

"[11] A book of Lerner's lyrics entitled A Hymn To Him, edited by a British writer Benny Green, was published in 1987.

At the time of Lerner's death, he had been working with Gerard Kenny and Kristi Kane in London on a musical version of the film My Man Godfrey.

He wrote "Masquerade", but he then informed Webber that he wanted to leave the project because he was losing his memory (he had developed metastatic lung cancer) and Charles Hart replaced him.

After he's written the melody, then I write the lyrics.In a 1979 interview on NPR's All Things Considered, Lerner went into some depth about his lyrics for My Fair Lady.

Professor Henry Higgins sings, "Look at her, a prisoner of the gutters / Condemned by every syllable she utters / By right she should be taken out and hung / For the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue."

Two nights after it opened, I ran into Noël Coward in a restaurant, and he walked over and he said, "Dear boy, it is hanged, not hung."

[20][21] Lerner married eight times: Ruth Boyd (1940–1947), singer Marion Bell (1947–1949), actress Nancy Olson (1950–1957), lawyer Micheline Muselli Pozzo di Borgo (1957–1965), editor Karen Gundersen (1966–1974), Sandra Payne (1974–1976), Nina Bushkin (1977–1981) and Liz Robertson (1981–1986 [his death]).

[25] It was claimed that his divorce settlement from Micheline Muselli Pozzo di Borgo (his fourth wife) cost him an estimated $1 million in 1965.