Theodore Isidore Gottlieb, mostly known as Brother Theodore, was a German-born American actor and comedian known for rambling, stream-of-consciousness monologues which he called "stand-up tragedy".
18 Facts About Brother Theodore
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Brother Theodore's style is similar to Diseuse or Kabarett, which was popular in Western Germany during the 1920s and '30s.
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Brother Theodore worked as a janitor at Stanford University, where he demonstrated his prowess at chess by beating 30 professors simultaneously, and later became a dockworker in San Francisco.
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Brother Theodore played a bit part in Orson Welles' 1946 movie The Stranger.
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Brother Theodore voiced Ruhk, Mommy Fortuna's assistant and carnival barker in The Last Unicorn.
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Brother Theodore moved to New York City, and by the 1950s, his monologues, now darkly humorous, had attracted a cult following.
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Years earlier, Brooks had remembered seeing Brother Theodore drawing large crowds at small, eclectic clubs across the Lower East Side and sought him out to appear at his new club.
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Brother Theodore's attitude was very bleak, and he felt his career was over.
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Brooks wanted to charge ten or more dollars, but Brother Theodore insisted on four dollars, so as not to scare people away.
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Brother Theodore was from a rich family in Europe and then his whole family went to concentration camps and lost it all.
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Brother Theodore had all these provisions that he tried to use on us to not perform.
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Brother Theodore ended up doing the Saturday night midnight show for three years.
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Brother Theodore did voice work, including the voice-over to the American trailer for Lucio Fulci's The House by the Cemetery in 1981.
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An article on Brother Theodore appeared in RAVE magazine with color photos.
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Brother Theodore appeared in Billy Crystal's mockumentary Don't Get Me Started and voiced the character of an ointment expert on NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday version of Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer in 1995.
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Brother Theodore died in New York City on April 5,2001, at the age of 94.
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Brother Theodore is buried in Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Hawthorne, New York.
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Brother Theodore claimed on one of his David Letterman appearances that he had filmed a scene as a supermarket cashier in Leonard Part 6 starring Bill Cosby, but was fired after a day of shooting because he repeatedly mocked the star.