Bert Lahr
Bert Lahr, born
Irving Lahrheim, (
August 13,
1895 â€"
December 4,
1967) was a
Jewish-American comic
actor. Fittingly born a "
Leo" 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.
Dropping out of school at the age of fifteen to join a juvenile vaudeville act, Lahr worked his way up to top billing on the Columbia Burlesque Circuit. In 1927 he debuted in on Broadway in
Harry Delmar's Revels. Lahr played as a
comic actor, performing classic routines such as
The Song of the Woodman (which he later reprised in the film
Merry-Go-Round of 1938). Lahr had his first major success in a stage musical playing the prize fighter hero of
Hold Everything (1928-29). Several other musicals followed, notably "Flying High" (1930),
Florenz Ziegfeld's "Hot-Cha!" (1932) and "The Show Is On" (1936) in which he co-starred with
Beatrice Lillie. In 1939, he co-starred with
Ethel Merman in
DuBarry Was a Lady.
Lahr made his 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).
He also performed in television commercials, including a memorable series for
Lay's potato chips during its long-running "Betcha can't eat just one" campaign. Among other Broadway roles, Lahr played Queen Victoria in a sketch from the musical "Two on the Aisle." He also performed as Moonface Martin in a television version of "
Anything Goes" with
Ethel Merman reprising her role as Reno Sweeney and
Frank Sinatra as Billy Crocker. In the late 1950s, Lahr supplied the voice of an animated bloodhound in "Old Whiff", a short cartoon produced by
Mike Todd which featured the olfactory Smell-O-Vision process developed for Todd's feature film
Scent of Mystery (1960).
The more soft-spoken aspect of Lahr's broad-ranging vocal characterization of the Cowardly Lion was a strong influence on the voice used for the
Hanna-Barbera cartoon character
Snagglepuss.
Lahr died in 1967 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.
His son,
New Yorker theater critic
John Lahr, wrote a
biography of his father's life titled
Notes on a Cowardly Lion.
