Bert Lahr

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Bert Lahr in the 1930s.
Bert Lahr in the 1930s.

Bert Lahr, born Irving Lahrheim, (August 13, 1895 – December 4, 1967) was an American comic actor. Born in New York City, he is best remembered today for his role as the Cowardly Lion (and the farmworker "Zeke") in the classic 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz, but known during his life for a career in burlesque, vaudeville and Broadway.

Dropping out of school at the age of fifteen to join a juvenile vaudeville act, Lahr worked his way up to top billing on the Columbia Burlesque Circuit. In 1927 he debuted in on Broadway in Harry Delmar's Revels. Lahr played to packed houses, performing classic routines such as "The Song of the Woodman" (which he later reprised in the film Merry-Go-Round of 1938). Lahr had his first major success in a stage musical playing the prize fighter hero of Hold Everything (1928-29). Several other musicals followed, notably "Flying High" (1930), Florenz Ziegfeld's Hot-Cha! (1932) and The Show Is On (1936) in which he co-starred with Beatrice Lillie. In 1939, he co-starred with Ethel Merman in DuBarry Was a Lady.

Lahr made his feature film debut in 1931's Flying High playing the part of the oddball inventor that he had previously played on stage. He appeared in a number of musical shorts in the years following. In 1938, he came back to Hollywood to work on a number of feature films. Aside from The Wizard of Oz (1939), his movie career never caught on, possibly because his gestures and reactions were too broad for that intimate medium. His later life was troubled, although he made the transition to straight theatre. He costarred in a much-praised version of Waiting for Godot in 1956 at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami, Florida in which he played Estragon to Tom Ewell's Vladimir. Lahr thought of himself as the "top banana" in the production, telling Ewell "not to crowd him". (When Beckett learned of this, he complained that the play was being taken away from his "major character", Vladimir). Lahr later played Estragon in the play's short-lived Broadway run.

He also performed in television commercials, including a memorable series for Lay's potato chips during its long-running "Betcha can't eat just one" campaign. Among other Broadway roles, Lahr played Queen Victoria in a sketch from the musical "Two on the Aisle." He also performed as Moonface Martin in a television version of "Anything Goes" with Ethel Merman reprising her role as Reno Sweeney and Frank Sinatra as Billy Crocker. In the late 1950s, Lahr supplied the voice of an animated bloodhound in "Old Whiff", a short cartoon produced by Mike Todd which featured the olfactory Smell-O-Vision process developed for Todd's feature film Scent of Mystery (1960).

The more soft-spoken aspect of Lahr's broad-ranging vocal characterization of the Cowardly Lion was a strong influence on the voice used for the Hanna-Barbera cartoon character Snagglepuss.

In 1967, Lahr died of pneumonia in New York City in the middle of filming The Night They Raided Minksy's, forcing producers to use a double in several scenes. Fittingly, this last role was as a burlesque comic. Lahr is buried in Field Cemetery, Flushing, Queens.

His son, New Yorker theater critic John Lahr, wrote a biography of his father's life titled Notes on a Cowardly Lion

[edit] Filmography

Features:

Short Subjects:

  • Faint Heart (1929)
  • Hizzoner (1933)
  • Henry the Ache (1934)
  • No More West (1934)
  • Gold Bricks (1936)
  • Boy, Oh Boy (1936)
  • Whose Baby Are You? (1936)
  • Off the Horses (1937)
  • Montague the Magnificent (1937)

[edit] Stage Work


Preceded by
Zero Mostel
for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum		 Tony Award for Best Leading Actor in a Musical
1964
for Foxy		 Succeeded by
Zero Mostel
for Fiddler on the Roof

[edit] External links

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