Background

Bert Lahr was born Irving Lahrheim in the Yorkville section of New York City, the son of German immigrants Jacob Lahrheim, an upholsterer, and his wife, Augusta (her maiden name is unknown).

Education

Lahr attended Public School. After the family moved to the Bronx, Lahr, who was by his own admission a lazy student, quit school at the age of fifteen after one year at Morris High School.

Career

After his studies Lahr worked as an office boy in a jewelry house. In one year he had at least six additional jobs. During these formative years Lahr came to be called "Swedish" after squaring off against a brawny Swede. Despite parental objections, Lahr attended variety theaters frequently and got his first taste of performing for money by singing in blackface in the streets.

In 1910 he joined a child vaudeville act, the Seven Frolics, performing in a show called The Little Red School House. For the next several years he toured minor vaudeville circuits, appearing in such acts as Nine Crazy Kids, and Boys and Girls of Avenue B. With the Whirly Girly Musical Comedy Success he appeared in skits such as "College Days" and "Garden Belles. " Outgrowing child parts, Lahr was seen at the Olympia Theater in Brooklyn by William K. ("Billy") Wells, a vaudeville monologist and writer for the Columbia Burlesque Circuit.

In June 1917, through Wells's influence, Lahr joined Blutch Cooper's Best Show in Town as third comedian, opening in Cleveland that September with a troupe called the Roseland Girls. By perfecting his interpretation of the German-accented "Dutch" dumb-cop character that had fascinated him as a boy, Lahr soon became "the boy wonder of burlesque. " In three years his salary increased from $35 to $100 per week. Appearing in this troupe with Lahr was Mercedes Delpino, a dancer who became his vaudeville partner.

After brief service in the navy as a seaman second class stationed at Pelham Bay, Lahr expanded one of his burlesque skits into the twelve-minute vaudeville act "Lahr and Mercedes--What's the Idea?" and moved into big-time vaudeville, touring the Keith and Orpheum circuits for four years and earning $350 a week. In this and other acts, he developed the leer, grimace (said to make him look like "a camel with acute gastric disorder"), and wild cry of "gnong-gnong-gnong" (a sound that defies spelling) that were to be his stock-in-trade for years.

Lahr's major break came in 1927 with his Broadway debut in the revue Harry Delmar's Revels. This engagement led to his role as Gink Schiner, a punch-drunk fighter, in Hold Everything (1928), with Victor Moore. Despite his persistent self-doubts, Lahr was an overnight success. His newfound celebrity status led to three vaudeville engagements at the Palace in six months at $4, 500 a week and a series of successful musical appearances, including Flying High (1930); Hot-Cha! (1932); Life Begins at 8:30 (1934), featuring "The Woodchopper's Song, " a merciless travesty of concert baritones that he reprised often throughout his career, frequently on Ed Sullivan's television variety show; George White's Scandals (1935); and The Show Is On (1936) with Bea Lillie.

On December 6, 1939, Lahr opened with Ethel Merman in Du Barry Was a Lady. He played Louis Blore, a washroom attendant who dreams he is Louis XV. Lahr also appeared that year in his only enduring Hollywood role, that of the Cowardly Lion in the film classic The Wizard of Oz. Although Lahr appeared in a score of motion pictures, beginning with the short Faint Heart in 1931, his style was generally too broad for film.

Other films featuring Lahr included Flying High (1931), Mr. Broadway (1933), Hizzoner (a 1934 short), Gold Bricks (a 1936 short), Merry-Go-Round of 1938 and Love and Hisses (1937), Jossette and Just Around the Corner (1938), Zaza (1939), Du Barry Was a Lady (1940), Sing Your Worries Away and Ship Ahoy (1942), Meet the People (1944), Always Leave Them Laughing (1949), Mr. Universe (1951), Rose Marie (1954), The Second Greatest Sex (1955), Ten Girls Ago (1962), The Sound of Laughter (a 1963 documentary), and Big Parade of Comedy (a 1964 documentary). He also appeared on "The Hallmark Hall of Fame" in The Fantasticks, a 1965 television version of the off-Broadway musical hit.

The musical theater of the 1940's, which emphasized operetta-like sound and romantic stories, did not appeal to Lahr, so he played summer stock, performed on radio, appeared in a Billy Rose extravaganza (Seven Lively Arts) in 1944, and toured in Harvey in 1945. His major stage appearance of the 1940's was in a dramatic role, as Skid in a revival of Burlesque (1946), later seen on television.

In 1951 he returned to the musical stage in Two on the Aisle, a revue in the older tradition and a moderate success, although clearly Lahr's time as a star turn in musical theater, wherein he could dominate and glean most of the laughs, was at an end, as vividly illustrated in his last book musical, Foxy (1964), based on Ben Jonson's Volpone but set in the Alaska gold rush.

Lahr's career experienced an important turning point in 1956 when he appeared as Estragon in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, first in an ill-conceived production directed by Alan Schneider in Florida and then in its New York premiere, directed by Herbert Berghof. Despite his own uncertainty about the role and the play, Lahr was hailed for his performance, called by the New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson "Mr. Lahr's hour of triumph. " Association with the avant-garde of the 1950's brought Lahr roles in George Bernard Shaw's Androcles and the Lion and Molière's School for Wives, both on television in 1956. He toured as Bottom in the American Shakespeare Festival's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream and in 1966 he played Pisthetairos in Aristophanes' The Birds at the Ypsilanti (Mich. ) Greek Theatre Festival.

His last major straight role on Broadway--and a striking demonstration of his protean virtuosity--was in S. J. Perelman's The Beauty Part (1962), which Lahr considered one of his best efforts. Lahr was rarely out of work. He was one of the few of his generation to adapt to the changing times and to expand as a performer, learning how to use his archetypical character to touch a universal nerve. He was able to modulate his broad, exaggerated style, "to put comedy to the challenge of expanding along with the musical rather than containing it, " as the critic Ethan Mordden noted, and to move into comic forms far afield from his early training in vaudeville and burlesque. Lahr suggested that he had "developed a technique that might be called a style" and believed that a comedian should be able to make the audience cry as well as laugh. Lahr as a comic actor was also endowed with a look that was comic without speaking; a worried expression was always on his face, enhanced by small eyes set close together, a clown's mouth, and a large nose.

Lahr, an indefatigable worker, accepted jobs in his last years primarily for large fees and turned down less than lucrative roles. He gained public recognition for commercials made for Lay's Potato Chips ("Bet you can't eat just one"). In November 1967, while playing the role of Spats in The Night They Raided Minsky's, which was being filmed in New York, Lahr was hospitalized for a back ailment; he died shortly thereafter.

Achievements

• Dubbed the King of Clowns, Lahr was, with Buster Keaton, W. C. Fields, and Zero Mostel, one of great comic actors of the 20th century. He was known for his role as the Cowardly Lion, as well as his counterpart Kansas farmworker Zeke, in The Wizard of Oz (1939). He was well known for his explosive humor, but also adapted well to dramatic roles and his work in burlesque, vaudeville, and on Broadway. He received the Best Shakespearean Actor of the Year Award in 1960 for his perfomance at "A Midsummer Night's Dream". In 1964 he won the Tony Award for Best Leading Actor for his role in the musical "Foxy". In 1972, in recognition of his varied accomplishments, Lahr was elected to the Theatre Hall of Fame.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Rose Marie Remaster

    (Musical fans, we're calling you, oo-oo-oo, oo-oo-oo! Howa...)

  • Bert Lahr "FOXY" Johnny Mercer / John Davidson 1964 FLOP Detroit Tryout Playbill

    (I'm currently listing a large number of playbills from ou...)

  • Flying High

    (Man-crazy waitress Pansy Potts (Charlotte Greenwood) offe...)

  • Meet the People

    (Julie Hampton (Lucille Ball) can tote a lunch pail and ca...)

  • Du Barry was a Lady (Playbill, program)
  • The Wizard of Oz
  • Mister Universe

  • book

Personality

Lahr was a hypochondriac and an inveterate worrier. Schneider called him "the saddest of all men. "

Quotes from others about the person

• Atkinson said: "His long experience as a bawling mountebank has equipped Mr. Lahr to represent eloquently the tragic comedy of one of the lost souls of the earth. "
  
  One critic noted that "God must have laughed when he invented Mr. Lahr. "
  
  Brooks Atkinson said when Lahr passed away: "The last of the great buffoons has gone. He proved that he was not merely a hired fool but a gifted actor. "

Connections

Lahr married Delpino in August 1929. They had one child. The relationship, however, was strained irrevocably by Delpino's psychological problems. In April 1930 she was committed to a sanitarium in Connecticut. After a decade of litigation, their marriage was annulled.

On February 11, 1940, he married Mildred Schroeder, a former showgirl. They had two children, one of whom, John, became a critic and authored the definitive biography of Bert Lahr, Notes on a Cowardly Lion (1969).

Father:

Jacob Lahrheim

Upholsterer

Mother:

Augusta Lahrheim

Spouse:

Mildred Schroeder

Spouse:

Mercedes Delpino

Son:

John Lahr

Critic, author

References

• Notes on a Cowardly Lion: The Biography of Bert Lahr