Jack Gilford

 Jack Gilford (July 25, 1908 – June 4, 1990)

He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Save the Tiger (1973). While working in amateur theater, he competed with other talented youngsters, including a young Jackie Gleason. He started doing imitations and impersonations. His first appearance on film was a short entitled Midnight Melodies in which he did his imitations of George Jessel, Rudy Vallee and Harry Langdon. He was a unique blend of the earlier style of the Yiddish theater, vaudeville and burlesque, and started the tradition of monology such as later comedians Lenny Bruce and Woody Allen used. He won numerous industry awards. Gilford was nominated for several Tony Awards for best supporting actor as Hysterium in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1963), and for his role as Herr Schultz in Cabaret (1966). He was nominated for an Academy Award for best supporting actor in (1973) for his role as Phil Green in Save the Tiger (his co-star Jack Lemmon won for Best Actor). Sir Rudolf Bing engaged Gilford for the comic speaking role of the tippling jailer Frosch in the operetta Die Fledermaus. Loved in the part, Gilford performed it 77 times between 1950 and 1964.

In 1962, he appeared in the Broadway musical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. He co-starred in the play with his close friend, Zero Mostel. He later enjoyed success in film and television, as well as a series of nationwide television commercials for Cracker Jack. Gilford was married to actress Madeline Lee from 1949 until his death in 1990, and had three children. Following a year-long battle with stomach cancer, Gilford died in his Greenwich Village home in 1990, aged 81. He is interred at Mount Hebron Cemetery in Flushing, NY.