LAHR (lar)
American
comic actor
Common
clues:
Cowardly
Lion portrayer; Fearful feline actor Bert; Costar with Bolger and
Haley; “If I Only Had the Nerve” singer; Lionized
actor?; Garland costar, 1939
Crossword
puzzle frequency:
4 times a year
Frequency
in English language:
62396 / 86800
Video: Wizard
of Oz trailer
After The Wizard Of Oz I was typecast as a lion, and there aren't all that many parts for lions ~ Bert Lahr
Bert Lahr, born Irving Lahrheim, (August 13, 1895 – December 4, 1967) was a Tony Award-winning 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.
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 including: Merry Go Round of 1938 (1937), Love and Hisses
(1937), Josette (1938), Just Around the Corner (1938) and Zaza
(1939). 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).
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.
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Bert Lahr".
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