Danny Kaye | Biography & Songs | Britannica (2024)

Danny Kaye (born January 18, 1913, New York, New York, U.S.—died March 3, 1987, Los Angeles, California) was an energetic, multitalented American actor and comedian who later became known for his involvement with humanitarian causes.

The son of Ukrainian immigrants, Kaye began his performing career in the 1930s as a comic entertainer in hotels in the Catskill Mountains and in nightclubs across the United States. During this period he originated the pantomimes, rapid-fire scat singing, and physical antics that were to become his trademarks. He landed his first motion-picture role in the Educational Pictures’ short Moon over Manhattan (1935) and performed in other low-budget shorts, such as Dime a Dance (1937) and Cupid Takes a Holiday (1938), before the studio closed in 1938. Kaye soon achieved success on the Broadway stage, beginning with The Straw Hat Revue (1939) and Lady in the Dark (1940), in which he upstaged the legendary Gertrude Lawrence with his performance of “Tchaikovsky,” a patter song in which he rattled off the names of more than 50 Russian composers in rapid succession. Such tongue-twisting tunes—most of them written by Kaye’s wife, Sylvia Fine—became a regular feature of Kaye’s films and live performances throughout the next two decades. During the early 1940s Kaye performed for American servicemen and became enormously successful as a headline star in New York City nightclubs. It was in one of these clubs that Hollywood producer Samuel Goldwyn caught Kaye’s act and offered him a film contract. Since Kaye was a star before he made his first film, Goldwyn spared no expense on Kaye’s lavish musical comedies.

During the years 1944–63 Kaye starred mostly in films tailored to his talents as a singer, dancer, physical comic, and mimic. He frequently played multiple roles, such as twins or look-alikes, in the films Wonder Man (1945), On the Riviera (1951), Knock on Wood (1954), and On the Double (1961), or characters with multiple personalities, as in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947). Even when playing one role, Kaye created characters who were typically dichotomous—a blend of ineptness and resourcefulness—and who usually emerge wiser, ennobled, and triumphant at the end of the films. Kaye’s other standout films included The Inspector General (1949), in which he portrayed an illiterate medicine-show buffoon mistaken for the title character; Hans Christian Andersen (1952), featuring Kaye in a highly romanticized portrayal of the Danish master of fairy tales; White Christmas (1954), a perennial holiday favourite featuring Kaye and Bing Crosby as a song-and-dance team; The Court Jester (1956), a swashbuckler spoof and perhaps Kaye’s most-renowned film; and Merry Andrew (1958), in which Kaye portrayed a mild-mannered archeology professor who becomes a circus performer.

Although popular in the United States throughout his career, Kaye’s fame in England was characterized as “worshipful hysteria” by Life magazine. He first performed his one-man show at the London Palladium in 1948 and played return engagements throughout the 1950s; for one Kaye performance, England’s royal family made news when, for the first time in history, they left their royal box to sit in the front row of the orchestra.

While he appeared in few films after 1963, Kaye stayed in the public eye with a successful television series (The Danny Kaye Show, 1963–67), concert appearances, and the leading role of Noah in the Broadway musical Two by Two (1970). Mostly, however, he devoted his energies to charity work. He began his long association with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in 1953 and logged thousands of miles (frequently piloting his own plane) on behalf of the organization during the next three decades. He continued to perform occasionally, appearing in the film The Madwoman of Chaillot (1969), with Katharine Hepburn, and in the television films Pinocchio (1976), in which he played the role of Geppetto, and Skokie (1981), a highly praised docudrama that featured Kaye as a Holocaust death-camp survivor.

Kaye received an honorary Academy Award in 1955, the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1982, the French Legion of Honour in 1986, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 1987. He was one of the original owners of the Seattle Mariners baseball team, holding a partial interest in the club from 1977 to 1981.