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A concert pianist good enough to be, for a stretch in the 1940s, the highest-paid in the country, Oscar Levant recorded 33 albums and composed for more than 75 Hollywood films and Broadway shows. He appeared alongside Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly in MGM musicals and played himself in Rhapsody in Blue, the biopic of his close friend George Gershwin. Levant was equally known for turning his own psychiatric struggles — addiction to prescription drugs and repeated hospitalizations — into frank, funny material on his radio and TV appearances, at a time few public figures discussed mental illness at all.