Jack Gilford

He was was born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and grew up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Gilford was discovered working in a pharmacy by his mentor Milton Berle. 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. Gilford developed some unique impressions that became his trademarks — most notably, one of "split pea soup coming to a furious boil" using only his face. Other unusual impressions he created were a fluorescent light going on in a dark room, John D. Rockefeller Sr. imitating Jimmy Durante, and impressions of animals. Though he had broken into film and television by the 1940s, his career was stunted in the 1950s when Gilford's outspoken tendencies on politics drew the attention of show biz career killers, the House Un-American Activities Committee (or HUAC). Both Gilford and his wife, actress Madeline Lee Gilford, were blacklisted as a result, and so they struggled to find work throughout the '50s. But as the decade drew to a close, so did the McCarthy Era, and by 1963, Gilford and another former blacklisted actor Zero Mostel were on Broadway in the wildly popular Rome-set farce A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. He was nominated for Tony Awards for best supporting actor as Hysterium in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and for his role as Herr Schultz in Cabaret (1966).

One of Gilford's specialties was pantomime, and this talent was put to good use by director George Abbott when he cast Gilford as the silent King Sextimus in Once Upon a Mattress (Off-Broadway, 1959). Gilford shared the stage with a young Carol Burnett in this production and reprised his performance with her in two separate televised versions of the show, in 1964 and in 1972. 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. His other successful roles on the Broadway stage include Drink To Me Only, Romanoff and Juliet, and The Diary of Anne Frank. He also enjoyed success in film reprising his role for the film version of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum in 1966, his other films include Mister Buddwing (1966) with James Garner, Carl Reiner's Enter Laughing (1967), Who's Minding the Mint? (1968) reuniting him with Milton Berle, The Incident (1967) with Thelma Ritter and Martin Sheen, Mike Nichol's all-star Catch-22 (1970), They Might Be Giants (1971) with George C. Scott, 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), Harry and Walter Go to New York (1976) with James Caan, Wholly Moses! (1980) with Dudley Moore, Caveman (1981) with Ringo Starr and Shelly Long, Cocoon (1985) and it's 1988 sequel and Arthur 2: On the Rocks (1988).

On TV he was a guest on such series as Here's Lucy, Get Smart, The Love Boat, All in the Family, The Carol Burnett Show, Soap, Mama's Family, Night Court and Head of the Class, He played Alex Rieger's father on Taxi and he married Sophia on The Golden Girls. He was in a 1969 version of Arsenic and Old Lace with Helen Hayes, Fred Gwynne and Sue Lyon. He was also in the short-lived TV series Apple Pie (1978) starring Rue McClanahan and Dabney Coleman as well as The Duck Factory (1984) with a very young Jim Carrey. His TV movies include Goldie and the Boxer Go to Hollywood (1981), Anna to the Infinite Power (1983) and Hostage Flight (1985). He was also known for a a series of nationwide television commercials for Cracker Jack between 1967 and 1972. Following a year-long battle with stomach cancer, Gilford died in his Greenwich Village home in 1990, aged 81. His wife, Madeline Lee Gilford, died on April 15, 2008, from undisclosed causes. Gilford is buried in the Yiddish theater section of Flushing, New York's Mount Hebron Cemetery.