Art Garfunkel Bio
Arthur Ira Garfunkel (born 5 November 1941) is an American singer, actor, and poet who became world famous as the higher voice in the folk-rock duo Simon and Garfunkel. Working alongside Paul Simon from their teenage years in Queens, Garfunkel helped shape a catalog of songs that defined the sound of the 1960s, including “The Sound of Silence,” “Mrs. Robinson,” and “Bridge over Troubled Water.” After the duo split in 1970, he built a long-running solo career, appeared in several films, and published collections of poetry. He has won eight Grammy Awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Award, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990.
Early Life and Background
Art Garfunkel was born in Forest Hills, Queens, New York City, to Rose Garfunkel, née Pearlman, and Jacob “Jack” Garfunkel, a traveling salesman. His father had earlier worked as an actor in Dayton, Ohio, before settling into sales, and his paternal grandparents had emigrated to the United States from Iași, Romania, at the beginning of the twentieth century, giving the family Jewish-Romanian roots. Garfunkel grew up as a middle child, with an older brother, Jules, and a younger brother, Jerome, and as a young boy often sang in synagogue.
His love of singing began in the first grade, when he lingered in the stairwell of his school to enjoy the echo and sing songs such as “Unchained Melody” and “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” His father later bought him a wire recorder, and Garfunkel spent afternoons recording himself so that he could listen for flaws and improve. At his bar mitzvah in 1954 at the Jewish Center of Kew Gardens Hills, he performed as a cantor, singing for more than four hours. In the summer of 1955, a lung infection kept him from running around, and he turned that summer into a private basketball practice, methodically working on his foul shot.
Garfunkel met Paul Simon in the sixth grade at Public School 164, when both boys were cast in an elementary school graduation production of Alice in Wonderland. The two discovered that they shared a passion for close harmony singing and modeled themselves on The Everly Brothers. Between 1956 and 1962, they performed together as “Tom and Jerry,” a name coined by their label, Big Records, occasionally playing school dances and releasing a 1957 single, “Hey, Schoolgirl,” that reached number 49 on the pop charts.
Path to Music
After high school, Garfunkel enrolled at Columbia University, where he initially majored in architecture and joined the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity. He sang with the all-male a cappella group the Columbia Kingsmen, played on intramural teams in tennis, skiing, fencing, and bowling, and lived in Carman Hall, where his roommate, Sanford Greenberg, later became blind from glaucoma. Garfunkel earned a Bachelor of Arts in art history in 1965 and went on to complete a Master of Arts in mathematics education at Teachers College, Columbia University in 1967, even beginning doctoral coursework in the same field during the peak years of Simon and Garfunkel’s success.
While still at Columbia, Garfunkel and Simon re-formed their act under their own names and signed with Columbia Records. Their 1964 debut album, Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., was not an immediate success, and Simon briefly left for England. After producer Tom Wilson added an electric backing to “The Sound of Silence” and released it as a single, the song climbed to number one on the Billboard pop charts, launching the duo into stardom. Between 1966 and 1970, they recorded the albums Sounds of Silence, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, Bookends, and Bridge over Troubled Water, and contributed several songs to the soundtrack of Mike Nichols’ 1967 film The Graduate.
Art Garfunkel Career
Early Career (1956-1970)
In the late 1950s, Garfunkel released two solo singles under the name Artie Garr, “Dream Alone” with “Beat Love” and “Forgive Me” with “Private World” on Warwick and Octavia Records, neither of which charted. As part of Simon and Garfunkel, he became one of the most recognizable harmony singers in popular music, with the duo collecting Grammy Awards for records such as “Mrs. Robinson” and the album Bridge over Troubled Water. The 1970 album Bridge over Troubled Water was the duo’s commercial peak, spending weeks at the top of the charts on both sides of the Atlantic.
Even before the breakup, Garfunkel began stepping out on his own. He made his film debut in 1970 as the naive Lieutenant Nately in Mike Nichols’ Catch-22, followed by a co-starring role as the idealistic Sandy in Nichols’ 1971 drama Carnal Knowledge. The role of Sandy earned him a Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actor in 1972, marking his first major recognition as an actor and signaling the new direction his career would take.
Breakthrough (1970-1980)
During a three-year hiatus from music after Simon and Garfunkel’s breakup, Garfunkel continued to act, appearing in Catch-22 and Carnal Knowledge, and even spent late 1971 to early 1972 teaching geometry to high school sophomores at the short-lived Litchfield Academy in Connecticut. Returning to recording, he released his first solo album, Angel Clare, in 1973. It reached number 5 in the United States and produced the singles “All I Know,” “I Shall Sing,” and “Travelling Boy,” along with the 1974 hit “Second Avenue.”
His second solo album, 1975’s Breakaway, included a brief reunion with Paul Simon on the Top Ten single “My Little Town” and featured “I Only Have Eyes for You,” which became his first United Kingdom number one. The 1977 album Watermark produced the Adult Contemporary hit “(What a) Wonderful World” with backing vocals by Paul Simon and James Taylor, and his 1979 album Fate for Breakfast reached number 2 in the United Kingdom on the strength of the single “Bright Eyes,” written by Mike Batt and later used in the animated film Watership Down.
In 1980, he sang on the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young track “Daylight Again” and took a leading role in Nicolas Roeg’s drama Bad Timing, playing Alex Linden, an American psychiatrist in a film that won the Toronto Festival of Festivals’ People’s Choice Award. He later starred in Good to Go (1986) and Boxing Helena (1993), and his most recent film appearance to date was in the 2009 comedy The Rebound.
Notable Works and Milestones
Garfunkel’s signature recordings include “The Sound of Silence,” “Mrs. Robinson,” “Bridge over Troubled Water,” and the solo standard “Bright Eyes,” while his acting résumé spans Catch-22, Carnal Knowledge, Bad Timing, and The Rebound. He has earned eight Grammy Awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Award, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with Paul Simon in 1990, underscoring a career that bridges folk-rock harmony, film, and the printed page.
Art Garfunkel Award Nominations
Garfunkel has received several major award nominations across his career in both music and film. His Golden Globe nomination for Best Supporting Actor came in 1972 for the role of Sandy in Mike Nichols’ Carnal Knowledge, and he has collected multiple Grammy nominations as both a duo member and a solo artist. In 2008, Rolling Stone magazine ranked him number 86 on its list of the 100 Greatest Singers of All Time, a placement that reflects decades of nominations from the recording industry and the music press.
Art Garfunkel Awards Won
Through his work with Simon and Garfunkel and as a solo artist, Art Garfunkel has won eight Grammy Awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Award that was presented in 2003. He and Paul Simon were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990, and his film Bad Timing earned the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto Festival of Festivals and the London Film Critics’ Circle Award for Best Director. His solo catalog has also produced multiple Adult Contemporary number-one singles in the United States and two United Kingdom number-one hits.
Art Garfunkel Family
Garfunkel was raised in Forest Hills, Queens, by his father, Jacob “Jack” Garfunkel, a traveling salesman with a past as an actor in Dayton, Ohio, and his mother, Rose Garfunkel, née Pearlman. He has two brothers, an older sibling named Jules and a younger brother named Jerome. His paternal grandparents emigrated from the Romanian city of Iași to the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century, settling in Manhattan before the family moved to Queens.
Personal Life
Garfunkel married Linda Marie Grossman in Nashville on October 1, 1972, and the couple divorced in 1975. From March 1974 until her death in 1979, he was in a relationship with the actress and photographer Laurie Bird, whose suicide deeply affected him. In late 1985, he met the former model Kathryn “Kim” Cermak on the set of Good to Go, and they married on September 18, 1988. The couple have two sons, Arthur Garfunkel Jr. and James Garfunkel, born in 1990 and 2005 via surrogate mother, and in 2024 Garfunkel and his namesake released a duets album titled Father and Son.