Actors - George Burns

Home > Listing Index > Actors > George Burns

	Actors - George Burns

For other people named Burns, see Burns (disambiguation).

George Burns, born Nathan Birnbaum, (January 20, 1896 – March 9, 1996), was an American comedian and actor, arguably the greatest straight man of 20th Century American comedy. His virtuosity in that role actually refined him in his late life renaissance as a standup punch-liner in his own right: his long-practised discipline as a straight man meant that, as a punch-liner, he probably knew by long-developed second nature what most comics spend years barely mastering in terms of prodding laughs with subtlety.

His career spanned vaudeville, film, radio, and television, with and without his equally legendary wife, Gracie Allen. His arched eyebrow (as effective at drawing laughs as best friend Jack Benny's exasperated pregnant pause) and cigar smoke punctuation (he used it as a pregnant pause prop, even though cigar smoking was as second-nature to him as to Groucho Marx) became familiar trademarks for over three-quarters of a century. But even more remarkable was his resurrection at an age when most men are either retired or deceased. Beginning at age 79, and ending with his passing at age 100, George Burns was better known than he was at any other time in his life and career.

From The Cantor's Son to the Peewee Quartet

Nathan Birnbaum was the ninth of twelve children born to Louis and Dorothy Birnbaum in New York City. His father was a substitute cantor at the local synagogue but did not work very often. During the flu epidemic of 1903, Louis had his chance to earn some real money but contracted the flu and died. Nattie (as he was known to his family) started working in 1903 after his father's death, shining shoes, running errands, and selling newspapers.

When he landed a job as a syrup maker in a local candy shop at age seven, Nattie Birnbaum was discovered, as he recalled many years later:

We were all about the same age, six and seven, and when we were bored making syrup, we used to practice singing harmony in the basement. One day our letter carrier came down to the basement. His name was Lou Farley. Feingold was his real name, but he changed it to Farley. He wanted the whole world to sing harmony. He came down to the basement once to deliver a letter and heard the four of us kids singing harmony. He liked our style, so we sang a couple more songs for him. Then we looked up at the head of the stairs and saw three or four people listening to us and smiling. In fact, they threw down a couple of pennies. So I said to the kids I was working with, 'no more chocolate syrup. It's show business from now on.'

We called ourselves the Peewee Quartet. We started out singing on ferryboats, in saloons and on street corners. We'd put our hats down for donations. Sometimes the customers threw something in the hats. Sometimes they took something out of the hats. Sometimes they took the hats.

Burns quit school in the fourth grade to go into show business full-time. Like many performers of his generation, he tried practically anything he could think of doing to entertain, from trick roller skating, teaching dance, singing, and adagio dancing in small-time vaudeville. During these years, he began smoking cigars---they became comic props as well as a real part of his way of life---and adopted the stage name by which he would be known for the rest of his life.

He normally partnered with a girl, sometimes in an adagio dance routine, sometimes comic patter. Though he had an apparent flair for comedy, he never quite clicked with any of his partners, until he met a young Irish Catholic lady in 1923. "And all of a sudden," he said famously (and repeatedly---never failing to get a laugh from it, either), in later years, "the audience realised I had a talent. They were right. I did have a talent---and I was married to her for 38 years."

Enter Gracie

Grace Ethel Cecile Rosalie Allen was born into a show business family; she was the daughter of actress Ronnie Burns and, after being educated at Star of the Sea Convent School in girlhood she teamed in vaudeville with her sister, Bessie, in 1909.

She met George Burns and the two immediately launched a new partnership---but they didn't click until Burns cannily flipped the act around: after a Hoboken, New Jersey performance in which they tested the new style for the first time, Burns's hunch proved right. Gracie was the better laugh-getter, especially with the "illogical logic" that informed her responses to Burns's prompting comments or questions.

Allen's half of the act was known generally as a "Dumb Dora" act, named after a very early film of the same name that featured a scatterbrained female protagonist, but her "illogical logic" style was several cuts above the Dumb Dora stereotype, as was Burns's understated straight man. The twosome worked the new style tirelessly on the road, building a following, and finally playing the vaudevillian's dream: the Palace in New York. With success came love: They not only never again even thought of Gracie playing the straight woman and George going for the punch lines, they fell in love along the way and married in Cleveland, Ohio on 7 January 1926---somewhat daring for those times, considering Burns's Jewishness and Allen's Irish Catholic upbringing. (For her part, Allen also endeared herself to her in-laws by adopting his mother's favourite phrase, used whenever the older woman needed to bring her son back down to earth: "Nattie, you're a nice boy," using a diminutive of his given name. When Burns's mother died, Allen comforted her grief-stricken husband with the same phrase.)

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for George Burns ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article George Burns; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Searches on eBay