70 Facts About Mel Brooks

Melvin James Brooks is an American actor, comedian, filmmaker, and songwriter.

Mel Brooks received a Kennedy Center Honor in 2009, a Hollywood Walk of Fame star in 2010, the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2013, a British Film Institute Fellowship in 2015, a National Medal of Arts in 2016, a BAFTA Fellowship in 2017, and the Honorary Academy Award in 2024.

Mel Brooks received five nominations for the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album finally winning in 1999.

Mel Brooks won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for The Producers.

Mel Brooks then rose to prominence directing a string of successful comedy films such as The Twelve Chairs, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Silent Movie, and High Anxiety.

Later Mel Brooks made History of the World, Part I, Spaceballs, Life Stinks, Robin Hood: Men in Tights, and Dracula: Dead and Loving It.

Mel Brooks wrote and produced the Hulu series History of the World, Part II.

Mel Brooks was married to actress Anne Bancroft from 1964 until her death in 2005.

Mel Brooks's father's family were German Jews from Danzig ; his mother was a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant from Kyiv, in the Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire.

Mel Brooks had three older brothers: Irving, Lenny, and Bernie.

Mel Brooks's father died of tuberculosis of the kidney at 34 when Brooks was two years old.

Mel Brooks was a small, sickly boy who often was bullied and teased by his classmates because of his size.

When Mel Brooks was 14 he gained employment as a pool-side tummler at the Butler Lodge, a second-rate Borscht Belt hotel, where he met 18-year-old Sid Caesar.

Mel Brooks was taught by Buddy Rich how to play the drums, and started to earn money as a musician when he was 14.

Mel Brooks graduated from Eastern District High School in Williamsburg in January 1944 and intended to follow his older brother and enroll in Brooklyn College to study psychology.

Mel Brooks made high scores and was sent to the Army Specialized Training Program at the Virginia Military Institute to be taught electrical engineering, horse riding, and saber fighting.

Mel Brooks was then sent back to Fort Dix for overseas assignment.

Mel Brooks was tasked with land mine location; defusing was done by a specialist.

Mel Brooks has stated that when he heard Germans singing over loudspeakers, he responded by singing American-Jewish singer Al Jolson's hit "Toot, Toot, Tootsie " into a bullhorn.

Mel Brooks spent time in the stockade after taking an anti-Semitic heckler's helmet off and smashing him in the head with his mess kit.

Mel Brooks's unit constructed the first Bailey bridge over the Roer River, later building bridges over the Rhine river.

In June 1946, Mel Brooks was honorably discharged from the Army as a corporal.

Mel Brooks began acting in summer stock in Red Bank, New Jersey, and did some radio work.

Mel Brooks eventually worked his way up to the comically aggressive job of tummler at Grossinger's, one of the Borscht Belt's most famous resorts.

Back in New York, Mel Brooks would slink around trying to catch Caesar in between meetings to pitch him joke ideas.

Mel Brooks found more rewarding work behind the scenes, becoming a comedy writer for television.

Mel Brooks said to me, 'Mel, you're an animal from Brooklyn, but I think you have the beginnings of something called a mind.

In October 1959, for a Random House book launch of Moss Harts autobiography, Act One, at Mamma Leone's, Mel Tolkin and Mel Brooks performed, and it was later recalled by Kenneth Tynan.

Kenneth Tynan saw the comedy duo perform at a party in 1959 and wrote that Mel Brooks "was the most original comic improvisor I had ever seen".

At one point, when Mel Brooks had financial and career struggles, the record sales from the 2000 Year Old Man were his chief source of income.

Mel Brooks adapted the 2000 Year Old Man character to create the 2500-Year-Old Brewmaster for Ballantine Beer in the 1960s.

Mel Brooks was involved in the creation of the Broadway musical All American which debuted on Broadway in 1962.

Mel Brooks wrote the play with lyrics by Lee Adams and music by Charles Strouse.

The animated short film The Critic, a satire of arty, esoteric cinema, was conceived by Mel Brooks and directed by Ernest Pintoff.

Mel Brooks supplied running commentary as the baffled moviegoer trying to make sense of the obscure visuals.

For several years, Mel Brooks toyed with a bizarre and unconventional idea about a musical comedy of Adolf Hitler.

Mel Brooks explored the idea as a novel and a play before finally writing a script.

Mel Brooks eventually found two producers to fund it, Joseph E Levine and Sidney Glazier, and made his first feature film, The Producers.

Mel Brooks finally found an independent distributor who released it as an art film, a specialized attraction.

At the 41st Academy Awards, Mel Brooks won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for the film over fellow writers Stanley Kubrick and John Cassavetes.

Mel Brooks makes a cameo appearance as an alcoholic ex-serf who "yearns for the regular beatings of yesteryear".

Mel Brooks then wrote an adaptation of Oliver Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer, but was unable to sell the idea to any studio and believed that his career was over.

When Gene Wilder replaced Gig Young as the Waco Kid, he did so only when Mel Brooks agreed that his next film would be a script that Wilder had been working on: a spoof of the Universal series of Frankenstein films from several decades earlier.

Mel Brooks sought to purchase the rights to 84 Charing Cross Road for his wife, Anne Bancroft, for many years.

Mel Brooks produced the comedy Fatso that Bancroft directed.

In 1981, Mel Brooks joked that the only genres that he hadn't spoofed were historical epics and Biblical spectacles.

Mel Brooks produced and starred in a remake of Ernst Lubitsch's 1942 film To Be or Not to Be.

The second movie Mel Brooks directed in the 1980s was Spaceballs, a parody of science fiction, mainly Star Wars.

In 1989, Mel Brooks made another attempt at television success with the sitcom The Nutt House, featuring Mel Brooks regulars Harvey Korman and Cloris Leachman.

Life Stinks was a financial and critical failure, but is notable as the only film Mel Brooks directed that is neither a parody nor a film about other films or theater.

Mel Brooks created the musical adaptation of his film The Producers on the Broadway in 2001.

In early April 2006, Mel Brooks began composing the score to a Broadway musical adaptation of Young Frankenstein, which he says is "perhaps the best movie [he] ever made".

Mel Brooks returned, to voice Dracula's father, Vlad, in Hotel Transylvania 2 and Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation.

On October 18,2021, it was announced that Mel Brooks would write and produce History of the World, Part II, a follow-up TV series on Hulu to his 1981 movie.

Mel Brooks received a nomination for Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Character Voice-Over Performance for his role as the narrator in the series.

Mel Brooks is one of the few people who have received an Oscar, an Emmy, a Tony, and a Grammy.

Mel Brooks won his first Grammy for Best Spoken Comedy Album in 1999 for his recording of The 2000 Year Old Man in the Year 2000 with Carl Reiner.

Mel Brooks won his first of four Emmy awards in 1967 for Outstanding Writing Achievement in Variety for a Sid Caesar special, and won Emmys in 1997,1998, and 1999 for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series for his role of Uncle Phil on Mad About You.

Mel Brooks won his Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 1968 for The Producers.

Mel Brooks won his three Tony awards in 2001 for his work on the musical The Producers, for Best Musical, Best Original Musical Score, and Best Book of a Musical.

Mel Brooks won a Hugo Award and Nebula Award for Young Frankenstein.

On December 5,2009, Brooks was one of five recipients of the 2009 Kennedy Center Honors at the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC.

Mel Brooks was inducted into the Hollywood Walk of Fame on April 23,2010, with a motion pictures star located at 6712 Hollywood Boulevard.

American Masters produced a biography on Mel Brooks which premiered May 20,2013, on PBS.

In 2014 Mel Brooks was honored in a handprint and footprint ceremony at TCL Chinese Theatre.

Mel Brooks met Florence Baum, a dancer in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, on Broadway.

In 1960, to escape his situation, Mel Brooks moved in with a friend, in Los Angeles.

Mel Brooks married actress Anne Bancroft in 1964, and they remained together for 41 years until her death in 2005.

Mel Brooks endorsed Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election in his first-ever public endorsement of a political candidate.

Mel Brooks endorsed Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.