45 Facts About Eddie Cantor

Eddie Cantor was awarded an honorary Oscar in 1956 for distinguished service to the film industry.

Eddie Cantor made his first public appearance in Vaudeville in 1907 at New York's Clinton Music Hall.

Eddie Cantor later toured with Al Lee as the team Cantor and Lee.

Eddie Cantor continued in the Follies until 1927, a period considered the best years of the long-running revue.

For several years, Eddie Cantor co-starred in an act with pioneer comedian Bert Williams, both appearing in blackface; Eddie Cantor played Williams's fresh-talking son.

Eddie Cantor was a headliner at The Steel Pier Theater in Atlantic City.

Eddie Cantor appeared on radio as early as February 3,1922, as indicated by this news item from Connecticut's Bridgeport Telegram:.

Eddie Cantor's appearance with Rudy Vallee on Vallee's The Fleischmann's Yeast Hour on February 5,1931, led to a four-week tryout with The Chase and Sanborn Hour.

At the 1939 New York World's Fair, Eddie Cantor publicly denounced antisemitic radio personality Father Charles Coughlin and then was dropped by his radio sponsor Camel cigarettes.

Eddie Cantor began making phonograph records in 1917, recording both comedy songs and routines and popular songs of the day, first for Victor, then for Aeoleon-Vocalion, Pathe, and Emerson.

Eddie Cantor was one of the era's most successful entertainers, but the 1929 stock market crash took away his multimillionaire status and left him deeply in debt.

Eddie Cantor was a composer, with his most famous song seldom attributed to him.

In 1935, along with Charles Tobias and Murray Mencher, Eddie Cantor wrote "Merrily We Roll Along".

Eddie Cantor himself was frequently caricatured in Warner cartoons of the period,.

Eddie Cantor had previously appeared in a number of short films, performing his Follies songs and comedy routines, and two silent features in the 1920s.

Eddie Cantor was offered the lead in The Jazz Singer after it was turned down by George Jessel.

Eddie Cantor continued making films over the next two decades until his last starring role in If You Knew Susie.

From 1950 to 1954, Eddie Cantor was a regular guest host on the television variety series The Colgate Comedy Hour.

Eddie Cantor refused, claiming no time to prepare an alternative number.

Eddie Cantor embraced Davis and mopped Davis's brow with his handkerchief after his performance.

When worried sponsors led NBC to threaten cancellation of the show, Eddie Cantor's response was to book Davis for two more weeks.

Eddie Cantor suffered a heart attack following a September 1952 Colgate broadcast, and thereafter, curtailed his appearances until his final program in 1954.

Eddie Cantor has appeared as a guest on several shows, and was last seen on the NBC color broadcast of The Future Lies Ahead on January 22,1960, which featured Mort Sahl.

Eddie Cantor appears in caricature form in numerous Looney Tunes cartoons produced for Warner Bros.

In Porky's Naughty Nephew a swimming Eddie Cantor gleefully adopts a "buoy".

An animated Eddie Cantor appears prominently in Walt Disney's "Mother Goose Goes Hollywood" as Little Jack Horner, who sings "Sing a Song of Sixpence".

Cantor's popularity led to merchandising of such products as Eddie Cantor's Tell It to the Judge game from Parker Brothers.

Eddie Cantor was often caricatured on the covers of sheet music and in magazines and newspapers.

Eddie Cantor was depicted as a balloon in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, one of the very few balloons based on a real person.

Eddie Cantor was the second president of the Screen Actors Guild, serving from 1933 to 1935.

Eddie Cantor began the first campaign on his radio show in January 1938, asking listeners to mail a dime to President Franklin D Roosevelt.

Eddie Cantor recorded a spoken introduction on a 1938 Decca recording of Alexander's Ragtime Band by Bing Crosby and Connee Boswell in which he thanks the listener for buying the record, which supported the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis.

That record hit No 1 on the charts, though Eddie Cantor did not sing on it.

Eddie Cantor was profiled on This Is Your Life, a program in which an unsuspecting person would be surprised on live television by host Ralph Edwards, with a half-hour tribute.

Eddie Cantor was the only subject who was told of the "surprise" in advance; he was recovering from a heart attack, and it was felt that the shock might harm him.

On October 29,1995, as part of a nationwide celebration of the 75th anniversary of radio, Eddie Cantor was posthumously inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame at Chicago's Museum of Broadcasting Communication.

Eddie and Ida Cantor were seen in a brief prologue and epilogue set in a projection room, where they are watching Brasselle in action; at the end of the film, Eddie tells Ida "I never looked better in my life".

Something closer to the real Eddie Cantor story is his self-produced feature Show Business, a valentine to vaudeville and show folks, which was RKO's top-grossing film that year.

Probably the best summary of Eddie Cantor's career is on one of the Colgate Comedy Hour shows.

Re-issued on DVD as Eddie Cantor in Person, the hour-long episode is a virtual video autobiography, with Eddie recounting his career, singing his greatest hits, and recreating his singing-waiter days with another vaudeville legend, his old pal Jimmy Durante.

Eddie Cantor appears as a recurring character, played by Stephen DeRosa, on the series Boardwalk Empire.

The girls provided comic fodder for Eddie Cantor's longtime running gag, especially on radio, about his five unmarriageable daughters.

Ida died on August 9,1962, at age 70 of "cardiac insufficiency", and Eddie Cantor died on October 10,1964, in Beverly Hills, California, after suffering his second heart attack at age 72.

Eddie Cantor is interred in Hillside Memorial Park Cemetery, a Jewish cemetery in Culver City, California.

Eddie Cantor was a Freemason via Munn Lodge No 190 in New York City.