Brooks, Mel

Brooks, Mel (1926- ), American film director, actor, and screenwriter. Brooks was born Melvin Kaminsky in Brooklyn, New York, to immigrant parents of “Russian-Ukrainian-Jewish intellectual heritage”. In the early 1940s he fulfilled his heritage by becoming a jazz drummer and stand-up comedian on the “borscht-belt” circuit. His routine of the “2,000-year-old man” was his most famous sketch, developed with Carl Reiner for the Sid Caesar Show in the 1950s. In 1964 he won an Academy Award (Oscar) for a cartoon short, The Critic, made with Ernest Pintoff. In 1968, his first film, The Producers, starring Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder, was an instant success. He followed it up with the rather less acclaimed The Twelve Chairs (1970), but was successful again with Blazing Saddles, a spoof Western, in 1974.

Since then Brooks has continued to direct and often star in his own comedies: Young Frankenstein (1974), Silent Movie (1976), High Anxiety (1977), his remake of the Ernst Lubitsch/Jack Benny classic To Be or Not to Be (1983), and several others. He brings a distinctive Jewish “chutzpah”—that is, barefaced cheek—to his work, best expressed in the larger-than-life portrayal by Zero Mostel of the failed impresario Max Bialystok in The Producers, extracting high comedy from the lowest human factors—fear, disappointment, incompetence, and greed. In his later work—Spaceballs (1987), Robin Hood, Men in Tights (1993), and Dracula—Dead and Loving It (1996)—Brooks appeared to have departed from the robust satire of some of his earlier work in search of a more zany and commercial style. Brooks's stage musical of The Producers opened on Broadway in 2001 starring Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane and won a record-breaking 12 Tony awards, including Best Musical. The production then transferred to London's West End in 2004, winning the Olivier Award for Best New Musical.