Mel Brooks

Brooks was born Melvin James Kaminsky on a tenement kitchen table on June 28, 1926, at 515 Powell Street in Brownsville, Brooklyn He grew up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn on 365 South 3rd Street. His father's family were German Jews from Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland). His mother was a Russian Jewish immigrant from Kiev, in the Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire (now Ukraine). His parents married in 1916. He had three older brothers: Irving, Lenny, and Bernie. His father died of tuberculosis of the kidney He has said of his father's death, "There's an outrage there. I may be angry at God, or at the world, for that. And I'm sure a lot of my comedy is based on anger and hostility. Growing up in Williamsburg, I learned to clothe it in comedy to spare myself problems—like a punch in the face." At age nine, he saw Anything Goes with William Gaxton, Ethel Merman, and Victor Moore at the Alvin Theater. After the show, he told his uncle that he was not going to work in the garment district like everyone else, but instead wanted to go into show business. When Brooks was 14, he gained employment as a pool-side tummler (entertainer) at the Butler Lodge, a second-rate Borscht Belt hotel, where he met 18-year-old Sid Caesar. During his time as a drummer, he was given his first opportunity as a comedian at the age of 16, filling in for an ill emcee. During his teens, he changed his name to Melvin Brooks, influenced by his mother's maiden name Brookman, after being confused with trumpeter Max Kaminsky. and intended to follow his older brother and enroll in Brooklyn College to study psychology. 1944–1946: World War II service In early 1944 in his senior year in high school, Brooks was recruited to take the Army General Classification Test, a Stanford–Binet-type IQ test. He received high scores and was sent to the Army Specialized Training Program at the Virginia Military Institute to be taught electrical engineering, horse riding, and saber fighting. In 1944, Brooks was drafted into the US Army. Of his experience there, Brooks noted: Along the roadside, you'd see bodies wrapped up in mattress covers and stacked in a ditch, and those would be Americans, that could be me. I sang all the time ... I never wanted to think about it ... Death is the enemy of everyone, and even though you hate Nazis, death is more of an enemy than a German soldier. Stationed in Saarbrücken and Baumholder, the battalion was responsible for clearing booby-trapped buildings and defusing land mines as the Allies advanced into Nazi Germany. Brooks spent time in the stockade after taking an anti-Semitic heckler's helmet off and smashing him in the head with his mess kit. His unit constructed the first Bailey bridge over the Roer River, In June 1946, Brooks was honorably discharged from the Army as a corporal. == Career ==

1949–1959: Early work and breakthrough '' starring Imogene Coca and Sid Caesar After the war, Brooks's mother had secured him a job as a clerk at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, but Brooks "got into a taxi and ordered the driver to take him to the Catskills", where he started working in various Borscht Belt resorts and nightclubs in the Catskill Mountains as a drummer and pianist. When a regular comic at one of the clubs was too sick to perform, Brooks started working as a stand-up comic, telling jokes and doing movie-star impressions. He also began acting in summer stock in Red Bank, New Jersey, and did some radio work. In the years after the war, Brooks's hero was comedian Sid Caesar. Back in New York, Brooks would slink around trying to catch Caesar in between meetings to pitch him joke ideas. Eventually, Caesar cracked and paid Brooks a little cash to throw him gags....At 24, Brooks got his break as a full-time writer. Brooks found more rewarding work behind the scenes, becoming a comedy writer for television. In 1949, his friend Sid Caesar hired him to write jokes for the DuMont/NBC series The Admiral Broadway Revue, paying him, off-the-books, $50 a week. In 1950, Caesar created the innovative variety comedy series Your Show of Shows and hired Brooks as a writer along with Carl Reiner, Neil Simon, Danny Simon, and head writer Mel Tolkin. Reiner, as creator of The Dick Van Dyke Show, based Morey Amsterdam's character Buddy Sorell on Brooks. Likewise, the film My Favorite Year (1982) is loosely based on Brooks's experiences as a writer on the show, including an encounter with actor Errol Flynn. Neil Simon's play Laughter on the 23rd Floor (1993) is also loosely based on the production of the show, and the character Ira Stone is based on Brooks. Your Show of Shows ended in 1954 when performer Imogene Coca left to host her own show. Caesar then created ''Caesar's Hour with most of the same cast and writers, including Brooks and adding Woody Allen and Larry Gelbart. It ran from 1954 until 1957. Brooks told The New York Times, "When I was a fledgling comedy writer working for Sid Caesar on Your Show of Shows'', our head writer was Mel Tolkin... I really looked up to him. (By the way, I was 5-foot-7 and he was six feet tall.) He was a bona fide intellectual, thoroughly steeped in the traditions of great Russian literature. One day, he handed me a book. He said to me, 'Mel, you're an animal from Brooklyn, but I think you have the beginnings of something called a mind.' The book was Dead Souls by the magnificent genius Nikolai Gogol. It was a revelation. I'd never read anything like it. It was hysterically funny and incredibly moving at the same time... It was a life-changing gift, and I still read it once a year to remind myself of what great comic writing can be." And yet, as he himself would later admit to Kenneth Tynan, during this same mid-'50s period, working with Caesar often proved so stressful and humiliating that Brooks felt despondent enough to contemplate suicide thirteen or fourteen times, and said he even had the pills to do it. At one point, his wife Florence had to beg him not to jump off an uptown pedestrian bridge they were crossing. 1958–1969: Rise to prominence on "The 2000 Year Old Man" albums Brooks and co-writer Reiner had become close friends and began to casually improvise comedy routines when they were not working. In October 1959, for a Random House book launch of Moss Harts autobiography, Act One, at Mamma Leone's, Mel Tolkin (standing in for Carl Reiner) and Mel Brooks performed, and it was later recalled by Kenneth Tynan. Reiner played the straight-man interviewer and set Brooks up as anything from a Tibetan monk to an astronaut. As Reiner explained: "In the evening, we'd go to a party and I'd pick a character for him to play. I never told him what it was going to be." At one point, when Brooks had financial and career struggles, the record sales from the 2000 Year Old Man were his chief source of income. Brooks was involved in the creation of the Broadway musical All American, which debuted on Broadway in 1962. He wrote the play with lyrics by Lee Adams and music by Charles Strouse. It starred Ray Bolger as a southern science professor at a large university, who uses the principles of engineering on the college's football team and the team begins to win games. It was directed by Joshua Logan, who script-doctored the second act and added a gay subtext to the plot. It ran for 80 performances and received two Tony Award nominations. The animated short film The Critic (1963), a satire of Norman McLaren's abstract animation, was conceived by Brooks and directed by Ernest Pintoff. Brooks supplied running commentary as the baffled moviegoer trying to make sense of the obscure visuals. It won the Academy Award for Animated Short Film. with the iconic "Shoe Phone" in Get Smart With comedy writer Buck Henry, Brooks created a TV comedy show titled Get Smart, about a bumbling James Bond–inspired spy. Brooks said, "I was sick of looking at all those nice sensible situation comedies. They were such distortions of life... I wanted to do a crazy, unreal comic-strip kind of thing about something besides a family. No one had ever done a show about an idiot before. I decided to be the first." Starring Don Adams as Maxwell Smart, Agent 86, the series ran from 1965 until 1970, although Brooks had little involvement after the first season. It was highly rated for most of its production and won seven Primetime Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Comedy Series in 1968 and 1969. During a press conference for All American, a reporter asked, "What are you going to do next?" and Brooks replied, "Springtime for Hitler," perhaps riffing on Springtime for Henry. He explored the idea as a novel and a play before finally writing a script. The Producers was so brazen in its satire that major studios would not touch it, nor would many exhibitors. Brooks finally found an independent distributor who released it as an art film, a specialized attraction. At the 41st Academy Awards, Brooks won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for the film over fellow writers Stanley Kubrick and John Cassavetes. The Producers became a smash underground hit, first on the nationwide college circuit, then in revivals and on home video. It premiered to a limited audience in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on November 22, 1967, before achieving a wide release in 1968. Brooks, along with his collaborator Thomas Meehan, later adapted it into a musical, which was hugely successful on Broadway and received an unprecedented 12 Tony awards. In 2000, Roger Ebert included The Producers in his canon of Great Movies, and remembered being in an elevator with Brooks and Anne Bancroft shortly after the movie was released: "A woman got on the elevator, recognized him and said, 'I have to tell you, Mr. Brooks, that your movie is vulgar.' Brooks smiled benevolently. 'Lady', he said, 'it rose below vulgarity. 1970–1979: Career stardom With the moderate financial success of the film The Producers, Glazier financed Brooks's next film, The Twelve Chairs (1970). Loosely based on Ilf and Petrov's 1928 Russian novel of the same name about greedy materialism in post-revolutionary Russia, it stars Ron Moody, Frank Langella, and Dom DeLuise as three men individually searching for a fortune in diamonds hidden in a set of 12 antique chairs. Brooks makes a cameo appearance as an alcoholic ex-serf who "yearns for the regular beatings of yesteryear". The film was shot in Yugoslavia with a budget of $1.5 million. It received poor reviews and was not financially successful. When Gene Wilder replaced Gig Young as the Waco Kid, he did so only when Brooks agreed that his next film would be a script that Wilder had been working on: a spoof of the Universal series of Frankenstein films from several decades earlier. After the filming of Blazing Saddles was completed, Wilder and Brooks began writing the script for Young Frankenstein and shot it in the spring of 1974. It starred Wilder, Marty Feldman, Peter Boyle, Teri Garr, Madeline Kahn, Cloris Leachman, and Kenneth Mars, with Gene Hackman in a cameo role. Brooks's voice can be heard three times, as the wolf howl when the characters are on their way to the castle, as the voice of Victor Frankenstein, when the characters discover the laboratory, and as the sound of a cat when Gene Wilder accidentally throws a dart out of the window in a scene with Kenneth Mars. Composer John Morris again provided the score, and Universal monsters special effects veteran Kenneth Strickfaden worked on the film. '', 1977 Young Frankenstein was the third-highest-grossing film domestically of 1974, just behind Blazing Saddles with a gross of $86 million. It also received two Academy Award nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Sound. It received some of the best reviews of Brooks's career. Even notoriously hard-to-please critic Pauline Kael liked it, saying: "Brooks makes a leap up as a director because, although the comedy doesn't build, he carries the story through ... [He] even has a satisfying windup, which makes this just about the only comedy of recent years that doesn't collapse." Silent Movie (1976) was written by Brooks and Clark, and starred Brooks in his first leading role, with Dom DeLuise, Marty Feldman, Sid Caesar, Bernadette Peters, and in cameo roles playing themselves: Paul Newman, Burt Reynolds, James Caan, Liza Minnelli, Anne Bancroft, and mime Marcel Marceau, who uttered the film's only word of audible dialogue: "Non!" It is an homage to silent comedians Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, among others. It was not as successful as Brooks's previous two films, but did gross $36 million. Later that year, he was named fifth on the Top Ten Money Making Stars Poll. High Anxiety (1977), Brooks's parody of Freudian psychoanalysis, as well as the films of Alfred Hitchcock, was written by Brooks, Ron Clark, Rudy De Luca, and Barry Levinson, and was the first movie Brooks produced himself. Starring Brooks, Madeline Kahn, Cloris Leachman, Harvey Korman, Ron Carey, Howard Morris, and Dick Van Patten, it satirizes such Hitchcock films as Vertigo, Spellbound, Psycho, The Birds, North by Northwest, Dial M for Murder, and Suspicion. Brooks plays Professor Richard H. (Harpo) Thorndyke, a Nobel Prize–winning psychologist who suffers from "high anxiety". Released that year was the dramatic film The Elephant Man directed by David Lynch and produced by Brooks. Knowing that anyone seeing a poster reading "Mel Brooks presents The Elephant Man" would expect a comedy, he set up the company Brooksfilms. It has since produced a number of non-comedy films, including Frances (1982), The Fly (1986), and 84 Charing Cross Road (1987) starring Anthony Hopkins and Anne Bancroft—as well as comedies, including Richard Benjamin's My Favorite Year (1982), partially based on Mel Brooks's real life. Brooks sought to purchase the rights to 84 Charing Cross Road for his wife, Anne Bancroft, for many years. He also produced the comedy Fatso (1980) that Bancroft directed. In 1981, Brooks joked that the only genres that he hadn't spoofed were historical epics and Biblical spectacles. Like Brooks's other films, it is filled with one-liners and the occasional breaking of the fourth wall. Robin Hood: Men in Tights was Brooks's second time exploring the life of Robin Hood (the first, as mentioned above, being his 1975 TV show When Things Were Rotten). Life Stinks was a financial and critical failure, but is notable as the only film Brooks directed that is neither a parody nor a film about other films or theater. (The Twelve Chairs was a parody of the original novel.) 2001–present in the West End Brooks created the musical adaptation of his film The Producers on the Broadway in 2001. The production starring Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick received critical acclaim and was a significant box office success. The New York Times theatre critic Ben Brantley praised the production writing, "Mr. Brooks has taken what could have been overblown camp into a far warmer realm in which affection always outweighs irony." The production broke the Tony Award record with 12 wins, a record previously held for 37 years by Hello, Dolly! with 10 wins including the Tony Award for Best Musical. It led to a 2005 big-screen version of the Broadway adaptation/remake with Lane, Broderick, Gary Beach, and Roger Bart reprising their stage roles, and new cast members Uma Thurman and Will Ferrell. In early April 2006, Brooks began composing the score to a Broadway musical adaptation of Young Frankenstein, which he says is "perhaps the best movie [he] ever made". The world premiere was at Seattle's Paramount Theater, between August 7, 2007, and September 1, 2007, after which it opened on Broadway at the former Lyric Theater (then the Hilton Theatre), New York, on October 11, 2007. It earned mixed reviews from the critics. In the 2000s, Brooks worked on an animated series sequel to Spaceballs called Spaceballs: The Animated Series, which premiered on September 21, 2008, on G4 TV. Brooks has voiced vocal roles for animation. He voiced Bigweld, the master inventor, in the animated film Robots (2005), and in the later animated film Mr. Peabody & Sherman (2014) he had a cameo appearance as Albert Einstein. He voiced Dracula's father, Vlad, in Hotel Transylvania 2 (2015) and Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation (2018). Brooks joked about the concept of a musical adaptation of Blazing Saddles in the final number in Young Frankenstein, in which the full company sings, "next year, Blazing Saddles!" In 2010, Brooks confirmed this, saying that the musical could be finished within a year; however, no creative team or plan has been announced. In 2021, at age 95, Brooks published a memoir titled All About Me!. On October 18, 2021, it was announced that Brooks would write and produce History of the World, Part II, a follow-up TV series on Hulu to his 1981 movie. He received a nomination for Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Character Voice-Over Performance for his role as the narrator in the series. In June 2025, Brooks announced a sequel to Spaceballs, Spaceballs: The New One, was being produced with a release date targeted for 2027. The same month, it was announced that Brooks would be executive-producing Very Young Frankenstein, a television project, for FX. The HBO documentary film Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man! was released for streaming on HBO Max in January 2026. ==Acting credits and accolades==

ceremony in 2010 Brooks is one of the few people who have received an Oscar, an Emmy, a Tony, and a Grammy. He won his first Grammy for Best Spoken Comedy Album in 1999 for his recording of The 2000 Year Old Man in the Year 2000 with Carl Reiner. His two other Grammys came in 2002 for Best Musical Show Album for the cast album of The Producers and for Best Long Form Music Video for the DVD Recording the Producers: A Musical Romp with Mel Brooks. He won his first of four Emmy awards in 1967 for Outstanding Writing Achievement in Variety for a Sid Caesar special, and won Emmys in 1997, 1998, and 1999 for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series for his role of Uncle Phil on Mad About You. He won his Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay (Oscar) in 1968 for The Producers. He won his three Tony awards in 2001 for his work on the musical The Producers, for Best Musical, Best Original Musical Score, and Best Book of a Musical. Brooks also won a Hugo Award and Nebula Award for Young Frankenstein. In a 2005 poll by Channel 4 to find ''The Comedian's Comedian'', he was voted No. 50 of the top 50 comedy acts ever by fellow comedians and comedy insiders. The American Film Institute (AFI) lists three of Brooks's films on its AFI's 100 Years...100 Laughs list: Blazing Saddles (#6), The Producers (#11), and Young Frankenstein (#13). In December 2009, Brooks was one of five recipients of the 2009 Kennedy Center Honors at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC. He was inducted into the Hollywood Walk of Fame in April 2010, with a motion pictures star located at 6712 Hollywood Boulevard. American Masters produced a biography on Brooks which premiered in May 2013, on PBS. The AFI presented Brooks with its highest tribute, the AFI Life Achievement Award, in June 2013. In 2014 Brooks was honored in a handprint and footprint ceremony at TCL Chinese Theatre. His concrete handprints include a six-fingered left hand as he wore a prosthetic finger when making his prints. In March 2015, he received a British Film Institute Fellowship from the British Film Institute. ==Personal life==

at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival in 2010 Marriages and family Brooks met Florence Baum, a dancer in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, on Broadway. They were married from 1953 until their divorce in 1962. They had three children. After earning a salary of $5,000 a week on Your Show of Shows and ''Caesar's Hour, his salary dropped to $85 a week as a freelance writer. For five years he had few gigs, and was living in Greenwich Village on Perry Street in a fourth-floor walk-up. In 1960, to escape his situation, Brooks moved in with a friend, in Los Angeles. In 1961, after his return to New York, he found that Baum had begun suing him for legal separation. Marriage Is a Dirty Rotten Fraud was an autobiographical script based on his marriage. They met at a rehearsal for the Perry Como Variety Show'' in 1961, and were married three years later on August 5, 1964, at the Manhattan Marriage Bureau. Their son, Max Brooks, was born in 1972. He has remained single since she died, stating in 2023 that "Once you are married to Anne Bancroft, others don't seem to be appealing". According to actor David DeLuise on Wizards of Waverly Pod, Brooks is his godfather; DeLuise's father, Dom DeLuise, was a frequent co-star of Brooks in his earlier career. Interests Brooks is a voracious reader; in a profile for The New Yorker, Kenneth Tynan describes "Brooks the secret connoisseur, worshiper of good writing, and expert on the Russian classics, with special reverence to Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevski, and Tolstoy." In The Producers, Bialystock refers to Bloom as "Prince Myshkin", a character from Dostoevsky's The Idiot, and the name Leo Bloom is a reference to Leopold Bloom, hero of Joyce's Ulysses. Jewish identity Regarding religion, Brooks stated, "I'm rather secular. I'm basically Jewish. But I think I'm Jewish not because of the Jewish religion at all. I think it's the relationship with the people and the pride I have. The tribe surviving so many misfortunes, and being so brave and contributing so much knowledge to the world and showing courage". Brooks has often expressed pride in his Jewish identity. In 2021, Brooks told NPR's Terry Gross: "I love being a Jew, I love Jewish humor..." On Jewish cinema, Brooks said, "They can be anything and anywhere ... if there's a tribal thing, like, the 'please God, protect us' feeling ... we don't know where and how it's gonna come out. Avatar was a Jewish movie ... these people on the run, chasing—and being pursued". Politics Brooks endorsed Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election in his first-ever public endorsement of a political candidate. He endorsed Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election. ==Discography==

Comedy albums • 2000 Years with Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks (World Pacific Records, 1960) • 2001 Years with Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks (Capitol Records, 1961) • Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks at the Cannes Film Festival (Capitol Records, 1962) • 2000 and Thirteen with Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks (Warner Bros. Records, 1973) • The Incomplete Works of Carl Reiner & Mel Brooks (Warner Bros. Records, 1973) • Excerpts from The Complete 2000 Year Old Man (Rhino Records, 1994) • The 2000 Year Old Man in the Year 2000 (Rhino Records, 1997) Soundtracks • The Producers (RCA Victor, 1968) • High Anxiety – Original Soundtrack (Asylum Records, 1978) • History of the World Part I (Warner Bros. Records, 1981) • To Be or Not to Be (Island Records, 1984) • The Producers: Original Broadway Recording (Sony Classical, 2001) ==Bibliography==