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Biography: Bert Lahr

"How many lion parts are there?" Thus did Bert Lahr, a major comedy star on Broadway, sum up his occasionally interesting but largely unfulfilling film career. Dropping out of school at 15 to join a juvenile vaudeville act, Lahr worked his way up from second comic to top banana on the Columbia Burlesque Circuit. Along the way, he married his first wife Mercedes Delpino, who was also his onstage partner. Lahr gained popularity with lowbrows and the intelligentsia alike with his grotesque facial expressions, his apparently ad-libbed one-liners, and his plaintive expletive "gnaang, gnaang gnaang!" He graduated from vaudeville to Broadway in 1927, going on to star in such fondly remembered musicals as Hold Everything, Flying High, and Life Begins at 8:40, performing such classic routines as "Stop in the name of the station house!" and "Woodman, Spare That Tree!" Lahr made his starring film debut in the 1931 movie adaptation of Flying High, but never truly caught on as a screen personality, possibly because his gestures and reactions were too broad for the comparatively intimate medium of films. Lahr's greatest screen performance -- indeed, one of the greatest performances ever captured on celluloid -- was as the Cowardly Lion in the perennial favorite The Wizard of Oz (1939). In the mid-1950s, Lahr gained a latter-day reputation as a sensitive dramatic actor when he was co-starred with E.G. Marshall in the first New York staging of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. For all his onstage buffoonery, Lahr was an intensely troubled, unhappy man, a fact driven home in Notes on a Cowardly Lion, a biography written by Lahr's son, theatre critic John Lahr. After making more money than he'd ever seen in his life as star of a series of potato chip commercials, Bert Lahr was cast as Professor Spats in the nostalgic 1967 film The Night They Raided Minsky's; Lahr died of cancer during production, forcing the producers to use a double for the actor in several scenes. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide less

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Movies (12)
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The Second Greatest Sex (1955)
Cast: Henry Mancini
Tags: Adventure Musical
Length: 87min
This musical is a contemporary version of Aristophanes' ancient play -Lysistrata. Instead of Greece, this play is centered in the town of Osawkie, Kansas and centers on the feuds between the men there and those of nearby towns. They are fighting over...
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Rose Marie (1954)
Cast: Busby Berkeley Marjorie Main
Tags: Comedy Musical
Length: 115min
1954's Rose Marie is the third film version of the 1924 Otto Harbach-Oscar Hammerstein-Rudolph Frinl operetta of the same name. Though not a completely faithful adaptation, this version is closer to the original than the (admittedly enjoyable) Nelson...
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Always Leave Them Laughing (1949)
Cast: Milton Berle
Tags: Slapstick Comedy Drama Showbiz Comedy
Length: 115min
Milton Berle was enjoying the first flush of his television success when his musical-comedy movie vehicle Always Leave Them Laughing hit the screens. Though his character name is Kip Cooper, Uncle Miltie more or less plays himself: an ambitious...
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Sing Your Worries Away (1942)
Tags: Comedy Musical
Length: 71min
How could anyone resist a 1940s film starring Bert Lahr, June Havoc, Buddy Ebsen and Patsy Kelly-even a film as relentlessly silly as RKO Radio's Sing Your Worries Away? Lahr is cast as zany songwriter Chow Brewster, the sweetheart of cigarette girl...
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Mr. Universe (1951)
Tags: Sports Drama Comedy
Length: 79min
Yes, that's Vincent Edwards under that lavish blonde hairpiece in Eagle-Lion's Mr. Universe. An unsubtle lampoon of professional wrestling, the film top-bills Jack Carson as manager Jeff Clayton, who convinces bodybuilding contest winner Tommy Tomkins...
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Josette (1938)
Cast: Bert Lahr
Tags: Romance Comedy Comedy of Errors
Length: 73min
In this musical comedy of errors, David Brassard, Sr. (William Collier, Sr.) has his heart stolen from him by a conniving, gold-digging nightclub singer named Josette (Tala Birell). Brassard's two sons, Pierre (Robert Young) and David Junior (Don...
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Zaza (1939)
Cast: George Cukor Claudette Colbert Herbert Marshall
Tags: Romantic Drama Melodrama Drama
Length: 83min
The old David Belasco theatrical warhorse Zaza, which starred Mrs. Leslie Carter way back in 1899, had already been filmed by Pauline Frederick in 1915 and by Gloria Swanson in 1923 when this Claudette Colbert version hit the screens in early 1939....
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Meet the People (1944)
Cast: Lucille Ball Dick Powell
Tags: Comedy Musical Romance
Length: 100min
MGM's musical extravaganza Meet the People top-bills two future powerful TV executives: Dick Powell and Lucille Ball. Ball plays a popular but stuck-up Broadway star who leaves the bright lights to become a welder in a shipyard. Here she meets and...
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Merry-Go-Round of 1938 (1937)
Cast: Mischa Auer
Tags: Comedy Musical Romance
Length: 87min
Merry-Go-Round of 1938 was the first (and last) of a proposed series of films spotlighting top Broadway talent. Three headliners from the Great White Way--comedian Bert Lahr, pantomime artist Jimmy Savo and monologist Billy House--team with veteran...
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The Wizard of Oz (1939)
Cast: Judy Garland Victor Fleming
Tags: Fantasy Musical Fantasy Children's Fantasy Family
Length: 101min
The third and definitive film adaptation of L. Frank Baum's 1900 children's fantasy, this musical adventure is a genuine family classic that made Judy Garland a star for her heartfelt performance as Dorothy Gale, an orphaned young girl unhappy with...
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Bert Lahr

Biography: Bert Lahr

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