Gertrude Berg
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| Gertrude Berg | |
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| Birth name | Gertrude Edelstein |
| Born | October 3, 1899 New York City, New York, USA |
| Died | September 14, 1966 (aged 66) New York City, New York, USA |
Gertrude Berg (née Gertrude Edelstein) (October 3, 1899 - September 14, 1966), was a pioneer of classic American radio, one of the first if not the first of her gender to create, write, produce and star in a long-running hit when she premiered The Rise of the Goldbergs (1929), later known as The Goldbergs.
Born in New York City, she married Lewis Berg in 1918. She learned theater in college while producing skits at her father's Catskills Mountains resort. She later developed one of those skits, a semi-autobiographical portrait of a Jewish family in the New York tenements, into the 15-minute series.
Americans of all stripes identified with the situations in The Goldbergs even if they weren't urban lower-middle-class Jews trying to assimilate into the new world. The show's characters received fan mail as often as the actors who played them did, and thousands of letters poured into the show's network when Berg herself was forced to miss time on the air due to illness.
Berg became inextricably identified as Molly Goldberg, the bighearted matriarch of her fictitious New York family who moved to Connecticut as symbolic of Jewish-American upward mobility. She wrote practically all the show's radio episodes (more than 5000) plus a Broadway adaptation, Me and Molly (1948). It took considerable convincing, but Berg finally prevailed upon CBS to let her bring The Goldbergs to television in 1949, where it stayed in production for five years. Berg won an Emmy award as Molly in 1949.
On television, The Goldbergs ran into trouble in 1951, when co-star Philip Loeb (as patriarch Jake Goldberg) was one of the performers named in Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television and blacklisted as a result. A strongly loyal person, Berg refused to fire Loeb. But Loeb was a strongly loyal man in his own right, loyal enough to Berg that he resigned rather than cause her trouble, and he reportedly received a generous severance from the show. It wasn't enough, however, to prevent Loeb from sinking into the depression that ultimately drove him to suicide.
The Goldbergs returned a year after Loeb departed the show and continued until 1954, during which time Berg also wrote a film version of the show. The show remained in syndicated reruns for another few years, after one year of production under the title Molly.
In 1959, Berg won a Tony Award as "Best Actress in a Play" for her performance in "A Majority of One." In 1961 she won the Sarah Siddons Award for her work in Chicago theatre. Berg also published a best-selling memoir, Molly and Me, in 1961 and made one last stab at TV success in the situation comedy "Mrs G. Goes To College" (retitled "The Gertrude Berg Show" in the middle of its one season on CBS in 1961-62), before she died of heart failure during routine tests in a New York hospital in 1966. A creative and energetic woman, Berg was among the earliest examples that women in broadcasting and on the stage could make themselves whole creative forces and not just actresses.
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[edit] External links
- Gertrude Berg at the Internet Movie Database
- Gertrude Berg at the Internet Broadway Database
- Interview with Fred Rogers Gertrude Berg on the PBS show Children's Corner, Archive of American Television interview with Fred Rogers, part 4 of 9, about ten minutes into the program.
- Gertrude Berg: America's Molly Goldberg Berg documentary currently in production
