Background

Ed Wynn was born on November 9, 1886, in Philadelphia, United States, the son of Joseph Leopold, a prosperous manufacturer of women's hats, and his wife, Minnie Greenberg, immigrants from, respectively, Czechoslovakia and Turkey.

Education

By his early teens, Wynn knew that he wanted to make entertainment his life and abandoned any thought of finishing his education at Philadelphia's Central High School.

Career

In 1901, at age 15, he ran away from home to join the Thurber-Nasher Repertoire Company as a general utility boy. Earning about $10 a week, he was mainly charged with distributing handbills and looking after luggage. But he also had an opportunity to play bit parts, and after adopting the stage name Ed Wynn (from the syllables of his middle name), he landed the role of an old retainer in American Grit. The company went broke, and Wynn had to return home, where his father tried to interest him in selling hats. The effort was wasted, however; in 1902, Wynn was off to New York, where he and Jack Lewis formed a comedy act called the Rah! Rah! Boys. The team had difficulty in obtaining engagements, and Wynn had to live on money sent to him by his mother. But after performing at a benefit, the pair received a booking at New York's leading vaudeville house, the Colonial, where Wynn found himself earning $200 a week. In 1904, after playing with Lewis for nearly two years, Wynn decided to develop an act featuring only himself. The venture proved successful almost from the start, and he was soon a headliner on the vaudeville circuit. In these early days, Wynn cultivated a comic style that in large degree set a pattern for the rest of his career. Writing his own material, he carefully avoided off-color jokes and instead rested his comedy on a combination of outrageous costumes and clever timing and delivery. In retrospect, many of his gags seem sophomoric, but coming from him, they had the power to engender laughter that sometimes lasted for minutes on end. In a routine of 1913, for example, Wynn played a hapless court jester facing certain death if he should fail to make his humorless monarch laugh. The king remained silently impassive throughout, but as a critic from Variety noted, audiences did not share his self-control in the face of Wynn's desperate antics. In 1914 and 1915, Wynn performed in the Ziegfeld Follies, where he is best remembered for hiding under a pool table used in the act of W. C. Fields and upstaging the unwary Fields by pretending to catch flies. In 1919, after several years of starring in one successful comedy or revue after another, Wynn's career took a sudden turn for the worse when he openly supported an Actors' Equity strike. Blacklisted for taking the union's part, Wynn soon found that no theater in New York would book him. But the setback was shortlived. Risking much of his financial security, he undertook to write and produce his own musical comedy revue. The result was Ed Wynn's Carnival, which opened in 1920 and proved an instantaneous hit. A year later, he realized even greater success with his creation and staging of The Perfect Fool--a title that eventually became his nickname. By now Wynn, with his crazy costumes, lisping voice, and growing supply of zany inventions, was becoming an institution. In the next several years he triumphed in two more vehicles of his own making, The Grab Bag (1924) and Laugh Parade (1931), and enjoyed much success in productions such as Manhattan Mary (1927) and Simple Simon (1930). Between 1932 and 1935, Wynn appeared on the radio as the Texaco Fire Chief, and because he felt that the only way to perform effectively was before real people, he became one of the first performers in that medium to work in costume before a live audience. Adopting a falsetto that he did not normally use on the stage, Wynn also introduced the practice of making both his sponsor and his announcer, Graham McNamee, the butt of jokes. These innovative high jinks delighted America, and it was estimated at one point that Wynn had more than 20 million listeners.

By the late 1930's, Wynn's life had become an emotional maelstrom. He faced with difficulties, his large investment in a new radio chain went bad, and he faced claims from the Internal Revenue Service for back taxes that amounted to more than $500, 000. In the wake of these adversities, Wynn suffered a nervous breakdown. Late in 1940, however, he returned to Broadway in Boys and Girls Together, where he introduced his eleven-foot pole for people he would not touch with a ten-foot pole. In 1944, Wynn returned to radio as King Bubbles in "Happy Island, " but the show was a failure. Wynn turned to television in the late 1940's, and from October 1949 to July 1950 he was the star of his own weekly variety show on the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS). From 1950 to 1953 he appeared every fourth week on the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) program "Four-Star Revue. " But now Wynn's brand of comedy was beginning to seem passed, and when NBC dropped him after 1953, it appeared that his career was over. In 1955, prodded by his son, who was now a successful character actor, Wynn took a role in the movie The Great Man (released in 1956), and in the process demonstrated his considerable potential for straight drama. Shortly thereafter, he appeared with his son in the widely acclaimed television drama Requiem for a Heavyweight, and over the next ten years, he played characters in a number of motion pictures, including Marjorie Morningstar (1958), The Diary of Anne Frank (1959), and Mary Poppins (1964). For his supporting performance in Anne Frank, he was nominated for an Academy Award. Not long after finishing his last film, The Gnome-Mobile (1967), Ed Wynn died on June 19, 1966, in Beverly Hills, California of throat cancer, aged 79.

Achievements

• Ed Wynn was a popular vaudeville comedian and radio, television, and film star best known for his Perfect Fool comedy character, his pioneering radio show of the 1930s and his later career as a dramatic actor. In 1950, Ed Wynn was awarded the Emmy Award (United States). On February 8, 1960, he was honored with three stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in the categories of Motion Pictures, Radio and Television. Wynn was posthumously named a Disney Legend on August 10, 2013.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Lost and Rare Film and TV Treasures: TV Pilots: Jane Powell Show, Maggie, Munroe, Meet McGraw, Ed Wynn Show (1954-1963)

    (Here are 5 highly worthy TV series "pilot" episodes, incl...)

  • Chief, The

    (The saucer eyes, dithering voice and jittery mannerisms a...)

  • Ed Wynn Show - Volume 1

    (Four rare episodes from the classic TV variety show featu...)

  • Ed Wynn Camel Comedy Caravan

    (Join Ed Wynn /in "The Camel Comedy Caravan" with guest st...)

  • Wynn, Ed Show, Volumes 1 & 2 (2-DVD)

    (A 2-DVD bundle pack with eight rare episodes from the cla...)

  • Ed Wynn Show, Volume 2

    (Four rare episodes from the classic TV variety show.)

  • Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse: The Man in the Funny Suit
  • TV's Greatest Comedians

Views

Quotations: "A bachelor is a man who never makes the same mistake once. "

"I've found a formula for avoiding these exaggerated fears of age; you take care of every day - let the calendar take care of the years. "

"A comic says funny things. A comedian says things funny. "

"A comedian is not a man who opens a funny door—a comedian is one who opens a door in a funny way. "

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• "When Wynn said anything funny, you believed everything he said. It made no difference how ridiculous the joke was. If he said he had an uncle who was walking around without his head, you absolutely believed it. " (Jack Benny)

Connections

On September 5, 1914, Ed Wynn married Hilda Keenan, they had a son. In 1937, they divorced. The same year, he married Frieda Mierse, and two years later they divorced. In 1946, Ed Wynn married Dorothy Elizabeth Nesbitt, but in 1955 they divorced as well.

Father:

Leiser Leopold

Mother:

Minnie Leopold (Greenberg)

Wife:

Frieda Wynn (Mierse)

Wife:

Hilda Wynn (Keenan)

Hilda Wynn (Keenan) was an American actress and vaudeville performer.

Wife:

Dorothy Elizabeth Wynn (Nesbit)

Son:

Francis Xavier Aloysius James Jeremiah Keenan Wynn

Francis Xavier Aloysius James Jeremiah Keenan Wynn was an American character actor.

Brother:

Leon Leopold

References

• Sherry Alberoni on The Ed Wynn Show (Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse Club Mouseketeer) Vintage UPI Wire Photo
• Satan's Holiday - song - piano/vocal from the Paramount film "Follow the Leader" starring Ed Wynn
• PERFECT FOOL: THE LIFE AND CAREER OF ED WYNN by Garry Berman (2011-11-11)
• The Ed Wynn Show - December 8, 1951
• Radio Comedy Classics from Post Bran Flakes - CASSETTE TAPE - 1988
• PERFECT FOOL: THE LIFE AND CAREER OF ED WYNN
• Nostalgia Digest, June-July 2000. Ed Wynn, Lone Ranger, Alfred Hitchcock and radio, Howdy Doody, Chicago Cubs, Our Miss Brooks, J. Carrol Nash