Happy Birthday, Bert Lahr

August 13, 1895 is the birth date of the acclaimed actor Bert Lahr. Born Irving Lahrheim in New York City, Lahr dropped out of school and went to work in vaudeville. Eventually Lahr found his way to Hollywood where he famously played the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz. He had small roles in other film and TV productions, including The Night They Raided Minsky’s, a film about burlesque, a world he knew well, which Lahr was filming when he died. Lahr remained best known as a stage actor. He starred as Estragon in the first American production of Waiting for Godot. It was a failure, but Lahr went onto star in the Broadway production of the play, which was a success.

Shortly after his death, Lahr’s son John Lahr wrote the biography Notes on a Cowardly Lion, about his father, which was both a fascinating book for people interested in vaudeville and burlesque and theater life in the early 20th Century, but also traced how Lahr’s origins in comedy were not foreign to Beckett and that Lahr understood the play on multiple levels, even if he couldn’t talk about it the way that others could. It’s an unflinching look at how his father could be, his brilliance and his flaws, and displayed the kind of nuance and thoughtfulness that John Lahr has approached writing about the theater and about people his entire career. But he makes his father known to us. Those who only know him as the lion who says “Heavens to Murgatroyd!” but shows how much more there was to that performance and to that life. The highs and lows of it all, the struggle, and how those decades of struggle defined him. There’s a lot of stories of Hollywood and the theater which are fun and fascinating to read about it, but ultimately it is the story of a son trying to understand and appreciate his father.