Fania Borach (1891 - 1951) - Genealogy Fania Borach New York, New York County, New York, United States Death: in Los Angeles, Los Angeles County, California, United States Place of Burial: Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles, California Immediate Family: Oct 29 1891 - New York City, New York Death: Charles Borick, Rose Borick (born Stern) Husband: Frances Stark (born Arnstein), William Jules Arnstein Siblings: Oct 29 1891 - New York City, New York Death: ; Fanny Brice grave... ; Fanny Brice (October 29, 1891 – May 29, 1951) was a popular and influential American illustrated song model, comedian, singer, theater and film actress, who made many stage, radio and film appearances and is known as the creator and star of the top-rated radio comedy series, The Baby Snooks Show. Thirteen years after her death, she was portrayed on the Broadway stage by Barbra Streisand in the musical Funny Girl and its 1968 film adaptation.

Early life Fanny Brice (occasionally spelled Fannie Brice) was the stage name of Fania Borach, born in New York City, the third child of relatively well-off saloon owners of Hungarian Jewish descent. In 1908, Brice dropped out of school to work in a burlesque revue, and two years later she began her association with Florenz Ziegfeld, headlining his Ziegfeld Follies from 1910 to 1911. She was hired again in 1921 and performed in them into the 1930s. In the 1921 Follies, she was featured singing "My Man" which became both a big hit and her signature song. She made a popular recording of it for Victor Records. The second song most associated with Brice is "Second Hand Rose," which she introduced in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1921. She recorded nearly two dozen record sides for Victor and also cut several for Columbia. She is a posthumous recipient of a Grammy Hall of Fame Award for her 1921 recording of "My Man".

Brice's Broadway credits include Fioretta, Sweet and Low, and Billy Rose's Crazy Quilt. Her films include My Man (1928), Be Yourself! (1930) and Everybody Sing (1938) with Judy Garland. Brice, Ray Bolger and Harriet Hoctor were the only original Ziegfeld performers to portray themselves in The Great Ziegfeld (1936) and Ziegfeld Follies (1946). For her contribution to the motion picture industry, she has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at MP 6415 Hollywood Boulevard. Radio From the 1930s until her death in 1951, Fanny made a radio presence as a bratty toddler named Snooks, a role she premiered in a Follies skit co-written by playwright Moss Hart. Baby Snooks premiered in The Ziegfeld Follies of the Air in February 1936 on CBS with Alan Reed playing Lancelot Higgins, her beleaguered "Daddy". Reed, a prolific radio character actor, is perhaps best remembered as the original voice of Fred Flintstone on the animated television series The Flintstones.

Brice moved to NBC in December 1937, performing the Snooks routines as part of the Good News show, then back to CBS on Maxwell House Coffee Time, with the half-hour divided between the Snooks sketches and comedian Frank Morgan. In September 1944. Brice's longtime Snooks sketch writer, Philip Rapp and David Freedman, brought in partners, Arthur Stander and Everett Freeman, to develop an independent, half-hour comedy program. The program launched on CBS in 1944, moving to NBC in 1948, with Freeman producing. First called Post Toasties Time (named for the show's first sponsor), the show was renamed The Baby Snooks Show within short order, though in later years it was often known colloquially as Baby Snooks and Daddy. On the spinoff version of Baby Snooks, Hanley Stafford played Daddy, with Reed instead appearing as Daddy's employer, Mr. Weemish. Stafford eventually became the longest running actor to portray the "Daddy" character. Brice was so meticulous about the program and the title character that she was known to perform in costume as a toddler girl even though seen only by the radio studio audience.

She was 45 years old when the character began her long radio life. In addition to Reed and Stafford, her co-stars included Lalive Brownell, Lois Corbet and Arlene Harris playing her mother, Danny Thomas as Jerry, Charlie Cantor as Uncle Louie and Ken Christy as Mr. Weemish. She was completely devoted to the character, as she told biographer Norman Katkov: "Snooks is just the kid I used to be. She's my kind of youngster, the type I like. She has imagination. She's eager. She's alive. With all her deviltry, she is still a good kid, never vicious or mean. I love Snooks, and when I play her I do it as seriously as if she were real. I am Snooks. For 20 minutes or so, Fanny Brice ceases to exist." Baby Snooks writer/producer Everett Freeman told Katkov that Brice didn't like to rehearse the role ("I can't do a show until it's on the air, kid") but always snapped into it on the air, losing herself completely in the character: "While she was on the air she was Baby Snooks.

And...for an hour after the show, she was still Baby Snooks. The Snooks voice disappeared, of course, but the Snooks temperament, thinking, actions were all there." Marriages Brice had a short-lived marriage in her teens to a local barber, Frank White, whom she met in 1910 in Springfield, Massachusetts, when she was touring in "College Girl." The marriage lasted three years and she brought suit for divorce in 1913. Her second husband was professional gambler Julius W. "Nicky" Arnstein. Prior to their marriage, Arnstein served fourteen months in Sing Sing for wiretapping. Brice visited him in prison every week. In 1918 they were married, after living together for six years. In 1924, Arnstein was charged in a Wall Street bond theft. Brice insisted on his innocence, and funded his legal defense at great expense. Arnstein was convicted and sentenced to the Federal penitentiary at Leavenworth where he served three years. Released in 1927, Arnstein disappeared from Brice's life and that of his two children. Reluctantly, Brice divorced him.

She went on to marry songwriter and stage producer Billy Rose and appeared in his revue Crazy Quilt, among others. Their marriage also failed. Television appearance and later years Brice and Stafford brought Baby Snooks and Daddy to television only once, an appearance in June 1950 on CBS-TV's Popsicle Parade of Stars. This was Fanny Brice's only appearance on television. Brice handled herself well on the live TV broadcast but later admitted that the character of Baby Snooks just didn’t work properly when seen. She returned with Stafford and the Snooks character to the safety of radio for her next appearance, on Tallulah Bankhead's big-budget, large-scale radio variety show, The Big Show, in November 1950, sharing the bill with Groucho Marx and Jane Powell. In one routine, Snooks asks Bankhead for advice on becoming an actress, despite Daddy's insistence that Snooks has no acting talent. Death Six months after her Big Show appearance, on May 29, 1951, Fanny Brice died in Hollywood of a cerebral hemorrhage. She was 59.

The May 29, 1951 episode of The Baby Snooks Show was broadcast as a memorial to the star who created the brattish toddler, crowned by Hanley Stafford's brief on-air eulogy: "We have lost a very real, a very warm, a very wonderful woman." Brice was cremated. Her ashes were interred in the Chapel Mausoleum at the Jewish Home of Peace Cemetery in East Los Angeles, California. A half-century later, at the time of Brice's daughter Frances' death in 1992, Fanny Brice's ashes were reinterred at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles, some 20 miles west of her original interment place. Today, the ashes, and those of her daughter, repose in an outdoor pavilion.

Brice portrayals Although the names of the principal characters were changed, the plot of the 1939 film Rose of Washington Square, in which the principal characters were portrayed by Tyrone Power and Alice Faye, was inspired heavily by Brice's marriage and career, to the extent it borrowed its title from a tune she performed in the Follies and included "My Man." She sued 20th Century Fox for invasion of privacy and won the case. Producer Darryl F. Zanuck was forced to delete several production numbers closely associated with the star. Barbra Streisand starred as Brice in the 1964 Broadway musical Funny Girl, which centered on Brice's rise to fame and troubled relationship with Arnstein. In 1968, Streisand won an Academy Award for Best Actress for reprising her role in the film version (sharing the Oscar with Katharine Hepburn, for The Lion in Winter, in the Academy's only tie vote for Best Actress in its history). The 1975 sequel Funny Lady focused on Brice's turbulent relationship with impresario Billy Rose and was as highly fictionalized as the original.

Streisand also recorded the Brice songs "My Man," "I'd Rather Be Blue Over You (Than Happy with Somebody Else)" and "Second Hand Rose," which became a Top 40 hit. Funny Girl, and its sequel Funny Lady, took liberties with the events of Brice's life. They make no mention of Brice's first husband at all, and suggest that Arnstein turned to crime because his pride would not allow him to live off Fanny, and that he was wanted by the police for selling phony bonds. In reality, however, Arnstein sponged off Brice even before their marriage and was eventually named as a member of a gang that stole $5 million worth of Wall Street securities. Instead of turning himself in, as in the movie, Arnstein went into hiding. When he finally surrendered, he did not plead guilty as he did in the movie, but fought the charges for four years, taking a toll on his wife's finances. It is thought that Ray Stark, the producer of the play and both movies and Brice's son-in-law, changed Arnstein's story in order to avoid a lawsuit, as Arnstein was still alive at the time.

Brice's son William was not mentioned in the play or movies by mutual agreement; other changes – such as the portrayal of Brice's mother as living in modest means rather than well-off or the omission of Brice's first husband – may have been done in the interest of compelling storytelling. In 2010, One Night with Fanny Brice, a one-woman show about Brice, written and directed by Chip Deffaa and starring Kimberly Faye Greenberg, premiered in New Jersey. The cast album, on the Original Cast label (OC-3831), was released in September 2010. The next production of the show, by the American Century Theatre Co. of Arlington, Virginia, starring Esther Covington, is slated to open in November 2010, directed by Ellen Dempsey. The 1946 Warner Bros. cartoon Quentin Quail features a character based on Brice's characterization of Baby Snooks. Legacy Two children were born of the Brice-Arnstein marriage.

Daughter Frances (1919–1992) married Ray Stark, while son William (1921–2008) became an artist of note, using his mother's surname. The Stony Brook campus of the State University of New York (SUNY at Stony Brook) formerly had a Fannie Brice Theatre, a small 75-seat venue which has been used for a variety of performances over the years, including a 1988 production of the musical Hair, staged readings, and a studio classroom space. The building was razed in 2007 to make way for new dormitories. Mexican comedienne Maria Elena Saldana was influenced by Brice, and would create a character similar to Brice's Baby Snooks, La Guereja. In 2006 Brice was featured in the film Making Trouble, a tribute to female Jewish comedians, produced by the Jewish Women’s Archive.

Fanny Brice - Biography - IMDb Fanny Brice Jump to: Overview (4) | Mini Bio (1) | Spouse (3) | Trivia (19) | Personal Quotes (7) Overview (4) 5' 6" (1.68 m) Mini Bio (1) Fanny Brice was a popular and influential American comedienne, singer, theatre and film actress, who made many stage, radio and film appearances but is best remembered as the creator and star of the top-rated radio comedy series, The Baby Snooks Show. Thirteen years after her death, she was portrayed on the Broadway stage by Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl. The show was made into a musical film in 1968. Born Fania Borach, in New York City, she was the third child of Rose (Stern) and Charles Borach, relatively well-off saloon owners of Hungarian Jewish descent.

In 1908, she dropped out of school to work in a burlesque revue, and two years later she began her association with Florenz Ziegfeld, headlining his Ziegfeld Follies from 1910 into the 1930s. In the 1921 Follies, she was featured singing "My Man" which became both a big hit and her signature song. She made a popular recording of it for Victor Records. The second song most associated with her is "Second Hand Rose". She recorded nearly two dozen record sides for Victor and also cut several for Columbia. She is a posthumous recipient of a Grammy Hall of Fame Award for her 1921 recording of "My Man". Her films include My Man (1928), Be Yourself! (1930) and Everybody Sing (1938) with Judy Garland. Brice, Ray Bolger and Harriet Hoctor were the only original Ziegfeld performers to portray themselves in The Great Ziegfeld (1936) and Ziegfeld Follies (1946).

For her contribution to the motion picture industry, she has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at MP 6415 Hollywood Boulevard. - IMDb Mini Biography By: Anonymous Spouse (3) Trivia (19) Starred in every Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway from 1910 until 1936. Starred in the widely popular 1940s' US radio comedy series as its title character, "Baby Snooks". Pictured on one of five 29¢ US commemorative postage stamps celebrating famous comedians, issued in booklet form 29 August 1991. The stamp designs were drawn by caricaturist Al Hirschfeld . The other comedians honored in the set are Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy ; Edgar Bergen (with alter ego Charlie McCarthy); Jack Benny ; and Bud Abbott and Lou Costello . Believed that pearls should not be taken off and needed to be lived in and so she would sleep in hers at night. Barbra Streisand played her in the musical Funny Girl (1968) and the sequel Funny Lady (1975). Biography in: "Who's Who in Comedy" by Ronald L. Smith, pg.

60-61. New York: Facts on File, 1992. ISBN 0816023387 Children with Arnstein: Frances (August 12, 1919-May 31, 1992) and famed abstract artist/painter William (April 23, 1921-March 3, 2008). Mother-in-law of Ray Stark . Following her death, she was interred in the Chapel Mausoleum at the Home of Peace Cemetery in Los Angeles, California. Following the death of her daughter Frances, she was reinterred at Westwood Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles, California. The birth name of her second husband, better known as Nick Arnstein, was actually Jules W. Arndt Stein. Dropped out of school after the eighth grade to work in a burlesque revue, "The Girls from Happy Land Starring Billy Watson". (12/31/37) Radio: Appeared in MGM production of "Good News of 1938" on NBC Network.

Also in cast: 'Myrna Loy', James Stewart , Wallace Beery , Bruce Cabot , Frank Morgan , Freda Starr, Gilbert Russell , Judy Garland , Dennis O'Keefe , Lewis Stone , Guy Kibbee and Cliff Edwards . She was awarded 2 Stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for Motion Pictures at 6415 Hollywood Boulevard; and for Radio at 1500 Vine Street in Hollywood, California. Profiled in the book "Funny Ladies: 100 Years of Great Comediennes" by Stephen M. Silverman (1999). Returned to work two months after giving birth to her daughter Frances in order to begin performing on the Broadway production of "Ziegfeld Midnight Frolic". Returned to work two months after giving birth to her son William in order to begin performing on the Broadway production of "Ziegfeld Follies of 1921". Was three months pregnant with her son William when she ended her run on the Broadway production of "Ziegfeld Follies of 1920". Was a staunch liberal Democrat. Became pregnant by her future husband Nick Arnstein prior to his divorce and their 1919 marriage, but she had an abortion.

Personal Quotes (7) Fanny Brice | Jewish Women's Archive by Barbara Wallace Grossman One of America’s great clowns, Fanny Brice built her career on a Yiddish accent and a flair for zany parody. In an era when ethnic comedy was the norm, she delighted audiences for more than forty years and won a following in almost every branch of American show business. During the fourth decade of her professional life, she became precocious radio brat “Baby Snooks,” and that is the role for which she is most often remembered. Yet “Snooks” was only one of Brice’s many inimitable characters and radio, the last of the entertainment forms in which her comic genius found expression. Before focusing exclusively on “the airwaves,” she appeared in burlesque and vaudeville, drama, film, and musical revues (including nine Ziegfeld Follies between 1910 and 1936). Brooks Atkinson, longtime drama critic of the New York Times, called Brice “a burlesque comic of the rarest vintage” and acknowledged her achievement in comedy, a field men had previously dominated.

Actress, singer, and comedian, Fanny Brice (1891–1951) performing on her radio show, October 6, 1950. Public domain. Born Fania Borach on October 29, 1891, Brice was the child of Jewish immigrants who had settled on New York’s Lower East Side, like so many successful entertainers of her generation. Her mother, Rose Stern, left a small village near Budapest to come to America in 1877. Charles Borach, her father, set off from Alsace during the late 1870s or early 1880s. When they met in Manhattan, Rose was working at a sewing machine in a fur factory and Charles was a bartender in a Bowery saloon. They married in 1886, moved to Second Avenue, and produced four children in the next seven years: Philip (“Phil,” born in 1887), Carolyn (“Carrie,” born in 1889), Fania (“Fanny,” born in 1891), and Louis (“Lew,” born in 1893).

At the time of Fanny’s birth, they were living on Forsyth Street. By 1895, they had left the Lower East Side’s congestion and crime for Newark, New Jersey. The Borachs bought a saloon that Charles Borach turned over to his wife’s efficient management and gambled away the money she worked so hard to earn. Tiring of the unequal partnership, she left her indolent husband and took her children to Brooklyn (c. 1902). Charles Borach followed them to New York and drifted into a series of odd jobs. When he died in 1912, he had lost virtually all contact with his family. Brice, who accepted the estrangement from her father as irrevocable, would mirror her mother’s experience. Like Rose Stern, she would marry unwisely and unhappily. She, too, would be a working mother, a single parent, whose relentless drive assuredly came from necessity as well as ambition. A chronic truant who ended her formal education sometime during or after the eighth grade, Brice yearned for a career in show business.

Encouraged by her success in neighborhood amateur night contests, beginning with a victory at Keeney’s Theatre on Brooklyn’s Fulton Street in 1906, she was determined to become a professional performer. While working at a Manhattan nickelodeon, she learned that musical comedy star George M. Cohan was holding auditions for The Talk of New York, the first of three shows he had written for the 1907–1908 season. Elated when she won a place in the chorus, the inexperienced Brice was fired before the musical’s December 1907 opening. Desperate for training, she paid thirty-five dollars to enroll in what she thought was an acting school and found herself touring in a ragtag production of the popular melodrama The Royal Slave. When the company went bankrupt in Pennsylvania, Brice refused to abandon her dream. With characteristic determination she turned to burlesque, the least selective branch of the entertainment business, and spent three formative years on the Eastern Burlesque Circuit (also known as the Eastern, or Columbia, Wheel).

Performing in The Transatlantic Burlesquers (1907–1908) as chorus girl Fannie Borach, she joined the cast of The Girls from Happyland for the 1908–1909 season. Although the show was poorly received, it was a landmark in her career because it marked her first appearance as Fanny Brice, the name she used for the rest of her life. She explained in a 1946 interview that she was tired of being called “Borax” and “Boreache” and chose Brice, the surname of a family friend, to prevent further teasing. She was also, undoubtedly, trying to seem less ethnic, less foreign, and less Jewish, thereby broadening her appeal. In 1908, she did not know that she would shortly find fame as an entertainer by exploiting her Jewishness and caricaturing her ethnicity. In Max Spiegel’s The College Girls the following season, she had her first sizable role.

Cast as Josie McFadden, she won praise for the specialty number she performed in the show’s second act, particularly her rendition of “Sadie Salome, Go Home.” It was, in her words, “a Jewish comedy song” by Irving Berlin, who must have known it would suit the lanky teenager with the big nose and wide mouth when he suggested it. An outrageous spoof of Salome dancing, a phenomenon once described as “the phoniest craze to hit show business,” the song was the first Brice performed with a Yiddish accent. In so doing, she was giving American audiences what they wanted. Ethnic comedy was still very much in vogue in the early years of the twentienth century, and minority groups were parodied by the popular arts. Racial and ethnic stereotypes appeared in serious dramatic fare and cavorted in burlesque and vaudeville. Although allegedly unable to speak Yiddish, she could join the many non-Jews who succeeded as “Jew comics” by adopting the externals required for “Hebrew impersonation.” Just as Al Jolson could put on his makeup and perform in blackface, Brice could assume the accent and the mannerisms for Yiddish dialect comedy.

With Sadie, she created the first of her many memorable characters and found the performance style that became her signature, a style based on deft parody, broad physical humor, and an accent used brilliantly for comic effect. She also attracted the attention of producer Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr., who hired her for his Follies of 1910. When he did, he was certainly not adding another lovely showgirl to his stable. Although far from unattractive by today’s standards, the tall, slender, Semitic-looking Brice did not conform to the prevailing notion of feminine beauty. She did not have the requisite rosebud mouth, pert upturned nose, or halo of blond curls, and Ziegfeld’s chorus of “long-stemmed American beauties” only exaggerated her difference from the norm. Yet, paradoxically, Ziegfeld provided the setting that displayed her comic talents to best advantage. If she could not be the prettiest girl on the stage, she would be the funniest. She was literally built for comedy.

Disappointed by her small part in the Follies of 1910, Brice added a rousing ragtime song, “Lovie Joe,” which quickly became one of the show’s big hits. Handicapped by poor material, however, she was far less successful in the Follies of 1911. When Ziegfeld failed to renew her contract at the end of the season, she signed with the rival Shubert organization and did not perform under the Ziegfeld banner again until 1916. During the intervening four years, she took part in seven musical revues, three of them in London, and had vaudeville bookings in over thirty cities. Yet, much of this work was undistinguished. She did not win critical acclaim as a Jewish maid in two Shubert productions, The Whirl of Society in 1912 and The Honeymoon Express in 1913. It was not until she hired songwriter Blanche Merrill that she developed into the “character comedienne” she had promised to be with “Sadie Salome.” They began collaborating in 1915, and Merrill, who specialized in writing for women, created material that suited her.

With such songs as “Becky’s Back in the Ballet” and “The Yiddish Bride,” she soared to stardom in The Ziegfeld Follies of 1916 and 1917. In spite of her Follies success, Brice wanted to develop her talents as a dramatic actor. The vehicle she unfortunately chose in 1918 was Why Worry?, a theatrical hodgepodge in which she floundered as waitress Dora Harris. Even the last-minute addition of two wonderful Merrill songs (“I’m an Indian” and “I’m a Vamp”) could not salvage Brice’s performance. She would be similarly disappointed in 1926 when she thought David Belasco’s production of the banal Fanny would establish her reputation as a serious actor and, instead, saw her efforts dismissed by the critics who referred to the show irreverently as “What Brice Glory?” and “Fanny’s Worst Play.” Why Worry? closed in September, and on October 18 Brice finally married the man she loved after a six-year relationship.

She had met handsome and sophisticated Jules Wilford “Nick” Arnstein in 1912 after a performance of The Whirl of Society in Baltimore and said she fell in love with him as soon as she saw his seven toothbrushes and monogrammed silk pajamas in the bathroom of his hotel suite. Contrary to her glowing perception of him, the Norwegian-born Arnstein was a con man and a criminal who operated under a number of aliases and failed at everything he attempted, including the wiretapping that sent him to Sing Sing in 1915 and the bond theft that led him to Leavenworth in 1924. Oblivious to his character flaws, she was also undeterred by the discovery that he was already married. (Brice herself had impulsively married barber Frank White in 1910 while touring with The College Girls, but never lived with him and obtained a divorce in 1913.) After Arnstein’s divorce in 1918, he and Brice married. They had two children, Frances (b. 1919) and William (b. 1921), but life was far from idyllic.

In 1920, “Nicky” was accused of orchestrating a Wall Street bond robbery. He fled New York but surrendered to the authorities two months after he disappeared. Convinced of his innocence, Brice financed his trial and lengthy appeal, endured the attendant notoriety, and remained loyal to him during his incarceration. They finally divorced in 1927, after his release from Leavenworth, on account of his flagrant infidelity. Years later, Brice admitted that she was shocked he did nothing to stop the proceedings or to contest the decree awarding her sole custody of their two children. He disappeared from their lives more abruptly than Charles Borach had vanished from Brice’s. From 1918 to 1927, Brice worked hard and steadily on the stage.

(She performed into the seventh month of both her pregnancies, returning to rehearsals soon after the birth of each child.) She appeared in three more editions of the Ziegfeld Follies (1920, 1921, and 1923), four other Ziegfeld shows (two Nine O’Clock Revues and two Midnight Frolics), and two non-Ziegfeld productions (Irving Berlin’s Music Box Revue in 1924 and the Hollywood Music Box Revue in 1927). She made several records, produced Is Zat So? and The Brown Derby, and filled the remaining time with lucrative vaudeville engagements. She refined her craft as a comic artist, describing herself as “a cartoonist working in the flesh,” and caused a sensation in The Ziegfeld Follies of 1921 with an uncharacteristically serious selection, “My Man,” designed to capitalize on her tumultuous relationship with Arnstein. Instead of the animated parody she typically offered, she stood almost motionless, sang without a funny accent, and created the illusion that she was sharing her own painful experience. The moving song always produced a powerful emotional effect on audiences who clamored for it.

Brice had some of her best comic material in the Follies of 1921, including spoofs of Ethel Barrymore in Camille and the memorable song “Second Hand Rose.” Yet dissatisfied with being “just a comic,” Brice still sought acceptance as a serious actor in a starring vehicle. In 1923, tired of being a sight gag, she decided to have cosmetic surgery on her nose. Algonquin wit Dorothy Parker quipped that Brice had “cut off her nose to spite her race,” and there was probably far more truth to that acerbic statement than Brice ever acknowledged. However legitimate her dramatic aspirations, she was motivated in part by her wish to escape from the ethnicity of her comedy. She seems to have decided that her Yiddish-accented routines had become too limiting, particularly in the xenophobic and racist climate of the 1920s when prejudice against ethnic groups was very real. She had escaped from Borach fifteen years earlier; at thirty-two, thanks to medical advances made during World War I, Protestant prettiness might actually be attainable.

Disappointed both with the results of the surgical procedure and the response to her attempts at more serious material, Brice accepted the inevitable and returned to comedy. Determined to find a starring vehicle that would catapult her into the nation’s consciousness, she turned to film. Even with her new nose, she did not have the kind of face Hollywood loved. She did not conform to its beauty standards any more than she had met Ziegfeld’s exacting requirements for his legions of lovely Follies girls. But she could sing and since Al Jolson’s 1927 triumph in The Jazz Singer, Hollywood needed voices. Promoted by Warner Brothers as a “female Jolson,” Brice became the first woman to star in a sound motion picture. Much to her dismay, she did not duplicate Jolson’s success. Her film, unimaginatively titled My Man and now lost, was a box-office disaster. Audiences across America simply could not relate to her Yiddish accent and comic mannerisms.

Although she would make six movies in all (including Be Yourself, 1930; The Great Ziegfeld, 1936; Everybody Sing,1938; and Ziegfeld Follies,1946), film stardom eluded her and she claimed she never felt comfortable in front of the camera. The year 1929 brought another critical failure in the musical Fioretta and in another marriage. Songwriter and aspiring impresario Billy Rose became her third husband in a civil ceremony on February 8 at Manhattan’s City Hall. Brice’s friends considered the union a mismatch, and her children compared the short, stocky Rose unfavorably to their handsome father. Nevertheless, the thirty-seven-year-old Brice seemed happy about the marriage. “I was never bored with Billy,” she later reminisced. They shared a passionate commitment to show business, and she spent the next two years performing in the musical revues her husband created to showcase her talent, Sweet and Low (1930) and Crazy Quilt (1931).

She also began a successful series of radio broadcasts and achieved her greatest stage triumphs in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1934 and 1936. In these posthumous editions of the Follies produced by the Shuberts, Brice created some of her most brilliant comic characters. From “Soul Saving Sadie” (a spoof on evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson) to “Countess Dubinsky” (an outrageous parody of stripteasing and fan dancing) and “Modernistic Moe” (an antic burlesque of modern dancer Martha Graham), Brice had never been funnier. With her humorous accent, mobile face, and wonderfully expressive body, in Billy Rose’s words, “she stood out like a bagel in a loaf of white bread.” Her amusing sketches included two in which she appeared as terrible toddler “Baby Snooks” and delighted audiences with her thoroughly believable impersonation, complete with hair ribbon, starched pinafore, ankle socks, and Mary Janes. “Snooks” would lead Brice to the radio stardom she desired. In 1937, with her marriage to Billy Rose disintegrating, she moved to California.

They were divorced on October 27, 1938. Beginning in November, she launched a new career on radio with a popular weekly program broadcast across the country. Instead of her gallery of comic creations, she played only “Baby Snooks,” the one character who did not require an accent of any kind. With antisemitism rampant in the United States and Europe, even Brice, admittedly uninformed about world events, must have realized that a Yiddish accent was probably not the best way to win a national following. “Schnooks,” as she liked to call her, ensured a much wider appeal. Brice suffered a serious heart attack in July 1945 but was well enough to resume her radio show in the fall. The profitable series continued until 1948, when she went off the air during a highly publicized contract dispute caused by fierce competition from the latest technological marvel to arrive on the show business scene: television. Rather than take a salary cut, Brice refused to work and began an autobiography she would not live to complete. Returning to radio in 1949, she continued happily wreaking havoc as Snooks.

She had no interest in making the transition to television and, ironically, was contemplating retirement when she had a stroke on May 24, 1951. She died in Los Angeles, five days later, without regaining consciousness. Reminiscing in her memoirs, Brice acknowledged the price professional women often pay for success: “If you have a career, then the career is your life. The hell with anything else. It is the biggest part of you and you can be married, have children, have a husband, but it isn’t enough for you because the career is always there in your mind, taking the best out of you which you should give to your husband and kids.” Yet, in what would have been the conclusion of her planned autobiography, she declared, “I made most things happen for me, and if they were good, I worked to get them. If they were bad, I worked just as hard for that. But I am not sorry. I will tell anybody that and it is the truth.

I lived the way I wanted to live and never did what people said I should do or advised me to do.” Ambitious, tenacious, and tough, a survivor in a ruthless business where fame is especially ephemeral, she achieved greatness when she accepted her comic gifts and abandoned her desire to become a serious actor. Critics frequently noted the “pronounced Jewish flavor” of her performances, and it is tempting to attribute a great deal of significance to Brice’s Jewishness. Although she worked with a Yiddish accent for many years on stage and screen, however, her routines were only superficially “Jewish” and did not stem from a deep sense of ethnic or religious identity. A performer in the dialect comedy tradition, Brice often played to the prejudices of the period, but mocking Jewish values was not generally part of her comic world and she was careful not to offend Jewish audience members. Even as the quintessential Jewish mother in the monologue “Mrs. Cohen at the Beach,” she managed to avoid vicious satire. Brice’s expressive delivery, coupled with her great warmth as a performer, humanized the stereotype and rounded the caricature into a character.

A truly popular entertainer, Fanny Brice worked hard to establish a rapport with her audiences. She did not deal with upsetting topics or controversial events, and people did not look to her for an evening of corrosive social commentary. A deft satirist capable of adroitly lampooning a variety of contemporary subjects, she seemed entirely uninhibited in performance, and her name always meant laughter, hilarious antics, and great fun. Whether spoofing ballerinas, opera singers, movie vamps, child stars, or nudists, her zany comedy made her special, and her lunatic creations inspired endless delight. A brilliant clown and a consummate professional, Brice was a genuinely funny woman who turned to show business, like so many other children of immigrants, and fulfilled the American dream. SELECTED WORKS OF FANNY BRICE “Fannie of the Follies,” as told to Palma Wayne. Parts 1, 2, and 3. Cosmopolitan (February, March, April 1936); “The Feel of the Audience.” Saturday Evening Post, November 21, 1925. FILMOGRAPHY Making Trouble (2006); Be Yourself.

United Artists (1930); Everybody Sing. MGM (1938); The Great Ziegfeld. MGM (1936); My Man. Warner Brothers (1928); The Ziegfeld Follies. MGM (1946). DISCOGRAPHY Fanny Brice-Helen Morgan: Rare Originals by Two Legendary Pioneers of Theatre and Tin Pan Alley. RCA Victor LPV 561. Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound at Lincoln Center; Great Personalities of Broadway: The Original Great Performances. RCA Camden CAL 745. Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives; The Original Funny Girl: Fanny Brice Sings the Songs She Made Famous. Audio Fidelity AFLP 707; The Original Torch Singers: Fanny Brice, Ruth Etting, Libby Holman, Helen Morgan, 1928–1935. Take Two Records TT 207; Ziegfeld Follies of 1934. Recorded live at the Shubert Theatre in New Haven, Conn., March 16, 1935. Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives.

Bibliography AJYB 24:125, 53:523; Atkinson, Brooks. Broadway (1974); Brice, Fanny. Papers. Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library at Lincoln Center, and Harvard Theatre Collection, Harvard College Library, Cambridge, Mass., and Theatre and Music Collection, Museum of the City of New York; BEOAJ; Busch, Niven, Jr. “Firesign.” In Twenty-One Americans (1930); Cantor, Eddie. Take My Life (1957), and Ziegfeld—The Great Glorifier (1934); Current Biography (1947); DAB 5; Dunning, John. Tune in Yesterday–the Ultimate Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio (1976); Farnsworth, Marjorie. The Ziegfeld Follies: A History in Text and Pictures (1956); Goldman, Herbert G. Fanny Brice: The Original Funny Girl (1992); Green, Abel, and Joe Laurie, Jr. Show Biz from Vaude to Video (1951); Green, Stanley.

The Great Clowns of Broadway (1984); Grossman, Barbara W. Funny Woman: The Life and Times of Fanny Brice (1991); Harmon, Jim. The Great Radio Comedians (1970); Katkov, Norman. The Fabulous Fanny: The Story of Fanny Brice (1953); Kutner, Nanette. “If You Were Daughter to Baby Snooks.” Good Housekeeping (March 1943); Laurie, Joe, Jr. Vaudeville: From the Honky-Tonks to the Palace (1953); NAW modern; Nelson, Stephen. “Only a Paper Moon”: The Theatre of Billy Rose (1987); Obituary. NYTimes, May 30, 1951, 21:1; Seldes, Gilbert. “The Daemonic in the American Theatre.” The Dial (September 1923); Spiegel, Irving. “Having to Do with Baby Snooks.” NYTimes, April 22, 1945; Sheppard, Eugenia. “Life with Mother.” Interview with Frances Brice Stark.

New York Herald Tribune, March 22, 1964; UJE; Who’s Who in the Theater, 11th ed. (1952); WWIAJ (1926 addenda, 1928, 1938); WWWIA 3; Zeidman, Irving. The American Burlesque Show (1967); Zolotow, Maurice. “Baby Snooks.” Parts 1 and 2. Cosmopolitan (September, October 1946). Updates 1000+ images about Fanny Brice on Pinterest | Funny girls, Comedy series and Ziegfeld follies Forward Fanny Brice (October 29, 1891 – May 29, 1951) was a popular and influential American illustrated song model, comedian, singer, theater and film actress, who made many stage, radio and film appearances (and is known as the creator and star of the top-rated radio comedy series, The Baby Snooks Show).

Thirteen years after her death, she was portrayed on the Broadway stage by Barbra Streisand in the musical Funny Girl and its 1968 film adaptation. See More Fanny Brice | Jewish Virtual Library Tweet Jerry Seinfeld is the latest in a long line of Jewish comic geniuses, such as Harold Lloyd, Eddie Cantor, George Burns, Milton Berle, Buddy Hackett, Sid Ceasar, Lennie Bruce, Mel Brooks and Gilda Radner, to name but a few. Seinfeld presents a relatively new image of the American Jewish comedian: low-key and au courant. With the exception of Lloyd and Burns, the great majority of successful American Jewish comedians attained popularity by fulfilling widely accepted ethnic Jewish stereotypes or by employing a manic, burlesque style of humor. In the first half of the 20th century, these expectations were almost impossible for Jewish comics to escape. No career illustrates the limits and possibilities of being a Jewish comedian better than that of Fanny Brice. Born on the Lower East Side of New York in 1891, the third of four children of immigrant saloon-owners, Fania Borach decided early in life to become a performer.

Historian Barbara Grossman notes that in an era in which entertainment was typically based on ethnic stereotypes -the drunken Irishman, the ignorant Pole, the Yiddish-accented greenhorn - Brice's "Semitic looks" slotted her into Jewish roles. Despite her efforts to succeed as a serious actress and singer, Brice - who spoke no Yiddish - rose to stardom performing comedy with a Yiddish accent. In 1908, dropping out of school after the eighth grade, the gangly, strong-voiced Fanny Borach found work as a chorus girl in a burlesque review. By the end of that year, she changed her name to Brice, probably, Grossman speculates, to escape limited Jewish stage roles. Ironically, a year later, she would make her first Broadway mark in a musical comedy, The College Girls, singing Irving Berlin's "Sadie Salome, Go Home" with a put-on Yiddish accent, while dancing a parody of the seductive veil dance in Richard Strauss' opera Salome. Her act brought down the house. Despite her desires, Brice had found her place as a "Jewish" entertainer.

Brice starred in the Ziegfield Follies in the 1920s and 1930s and became known for her beautiful voice and limber grace, which she always used in the service of humor. When she tried dramatic Broadway roles, her plays were unsuccessful. As Brice's fame increased, so did her notoriety. In 1918, she married Jules "Nicky Arnstein, a handsome, urbane but somewhat inept con man and thief she had lived with for six years. Despite Arnstein's infidelity and a stretch in Sing Sing Prison for illegal wiretapping, the devoted Brice stayed with him, had two children and supported him by working on-stage almost constantly.

Brice's tumultuous relationship with the ne'er-do-well Arnstein gave her material for a rare non-ethnic success: appearing in the Ziegfield Follies of 1921, the usually manic comedienne stood nearly motionless on the stage and, singing in a beautiful, unaccented voice, moved audiences to tears with her rendition of "My Man" with its now-classic lyrics, "But whatever my man is, I am his - forever." In 1924, Arnstein was charged in a Wall Street bond theft. Brice insisted on his innocence and funded his legal defense, at great expense. Arnstein was convicted and sentenced to the Federal penitentiary at Leavenworth. Released in 1927, the ungrateful and unfaithful Arnstein disappeared from Brice's life and that of his two children. Reluctantly, Brice divorced him. Brice had some of her greatest success during her years as Mrs. Arnstein, including her famous song "Second Hand Rose." Yet, in 1923, as biographer Grossman puts it, Brice "tired of being a sight gag" and had her nose surgically straightened.

Still, acceptance eluded her when she tried her hand at "American" drama. After a failed marriage to Broadway impresario Billy Rose and starring roles in Hollywood film, Brice found a niche -broadcast radio - that made her comfortable. In 1938, she launched her own weekly radio show. A wonderful mimic and impersonator with a great ear for dialect, Brice chose instead to limit herself to one character, Baby Snooks, a precocious, bratty toddler - who had no accent. Her enormously successful run on radio lasted until her death in 1951, just as television was beginning to capture the radio audience. Barbra Streisand paid tribute to Brice in her loosely biographical film Funny Girl. Lily Tomlin popularized a Baby Snooks-like character on television, Edith Ann, who sits in a rocking chair and makes ironic observations on the adult world. Both stars possess a freedom to choose roles that women have earned since Brice was slotted as Sadie Salome. Just as significant, the acceptance of Jerry Seinfeld's comfortable Jewish identity by a national audience illustrates the great liberation that American Jewry, male or female, has gained in the world of entertainment.

Fanny Brice Fanny Brice Role: Old Time Radio Star Born: October 29, 1891 Old Time Radio, New York City, New York, USA Died: May 29, 1951, Beverly Hills, Los Angeles, California, USA A popular and influential American illustrated song model, comedian, singer,theater and film actress, who made many stage, radio and film appearances and is known as the creator and star of the top-rated radio comedy series, The Baby Snooks Show. Thirteen years after her death, she was portrayed on the Broadway stage by Barbra Streisand in the musical Funny Girl and its 1968 film adaptation. Fanny Brice (occasionally spelled Fannie Brice) was the stage name of Fania Borach, born inNew York City, the third child of relatively well-off saloon owners of Hungarian Jewish descent.

In 1908, Brice dropped out of school to work in a burlesque revue, The revue was called 'The Girls from Happy Land starring Sliding Billy Watson and two years later she began her association withFlorenz Ziegfeld, headlining his Ziegfeld Follies from 1910 to 1911. She was hired again in 1921 and performed in them into the 1930s. In the 1921 Follies, she was featured singing "My Man" which became both a big hit and her signature song. She made a popular recording of it for Victor Records. The second song most associated with Brice is "Second Hand Rose," which she introduced in the "Ziegfeld Follies of 1921." She recorded nearly two dozen record sides for Victor and also cut several for Columbia. She is a posthumous recipient of a Grammy Hall of Fame Award for her 1921 recording of "My Man." Brice's Broadway credits include Fioretta, Sweet and Low, and Billy Rose's Crazy Quilt. Her films include My Man (1928), Be Yourself!

(1930) and Everybody Sing (1938) with Judy Garland. Brice, Ray Bolger and Harriet Hoctor were the only original Ziegfeld performers to portray themselves in The Great Ziegfeld (1936) and Ziegfeld Follies (1946). For her contribution to the motion picture industry, she has a star on theHollywood Walk of Fame at MP 6415 Hollywood Boulevard. Radio From the 1930s until her death in 1951, Fanny made a radio presence as a bratty toddler named Snooks, a role she premiered in a Follies skit co-written by playwright Moss Hart. Baby Snooks premiered in The Ziegfeld Follies of the Air in February 1936 on CBS with Alan Reed playing Lancelot Higgins, her beleaguered "Daddy." Brice moved to NBC in December 1937, performing the Snooks routines as part of the Good Newsshow, then back to CBS on Maxwell House Coffee Time, with the half-hour divided between the Snooks sketches and comedian Frank Morgan.

In September 1944, Brice's longtime Snooks sketch writers, Philip Rapp and David Freedman, brought in partners, Arthur Stander and Everett Freeman, to develop an independent, half-hour comedy program. The program launched on CBS in 1944, moving to NBC in 1948, with Freeman producing. First called Post Toasties Time, (named for the show's first sponsor), the show was renamed The Baby Snooks Show within short order, though in later years it was often known colloquially as Baby Snooks and Daddy. On the spinoff version of Baby Snooks, Hanley Staffordplayed Daddy, with Reed instead appearing as Daddy's employer, Mr. Weemish. Stafford eventually became the longest running actor to portray the "Daddy" character. Brice was so meticulous about the program and the title character that she was known to perform in costume as a toddler girl even though seen only by the radio studio audience. She was 45 years old when the character began her long radio life.

In addition to Reed and Stafford, her co-stars included Lalive Brownell, Lois Corbet and Arlene Harris playing her mother, Danny Thomas as Jerry, Charlie Cantor as Uncle Louie and Ken Christy as Mr. Weemish. She was completely devoted to the character, as she told biographer Norman Katkov: "Snooks is just the kid I used to be. She's my kind of youngster, the type I like. She has imagination. She's eager. She's alive. With all her deviltry, she is still a good kid, never vicious or mean. I love Snooks, and when I play her I do it as seriously as if she were real. I am Snooks. For 20 minutes or so, Fanny Brice ceases to exist." Baby Snooks writer/producer Everett Freeman told Katkov that Brice didn't like to rehearse the role ("I can't do a show until it's on the air, kid") but always snapped into it on the air, losing herself completely in the character: "While she was on the air she was Baby Snooks. And...for an hour after the show, she was still Baby Snooks.

The Snooks voice disappeared, of course, but the Snooks temperament, thinking, actions were all there." Marriages Brice had a short-lived marriage in her teens to a local barber, Frank White, whom she met in 1910 in Springfield, Massachusetts, when she was touring in "College Girl." The marriage lasted three years and she brought suit for divorce in 1913. Her second husband was professional gambler Julius W. "Nicky" Arnstein. Prior to their marriage, Arnstein served fourteen months in Sing Sing for wiretapping. Brice visited him in prison every week. In 1918 they were married, after living together for six years. In 1924, Arnstein was charged in a Wall Street bond theft. Brice insisted on his innocence, and funded his legal defense at great expense. Arnstein was convicted and sentenced to the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth where he served three years. Released in 1927, Arnstein disappeared from Brice's life and that of his two children. Reluctantly, Brice divorced him. She went on to marry songwriter and stage producer Billy Rose and appeared in his revue Crazy Quilt, among others.

Their marriage also failed. Television appearance and later years Brice and Stafford brought Baby Snooks and Daddy to television only once, an appearance in June 1950 on CBS-TV's Popsicle Parade of Stars. This was Fanny Brice's only appearance on television. Brice handled herself well on the live TV broadcast but later admitted that the character of Baby Snooks just didn’t work properly when seen. She returned with Stafford and the Snooks character to the safety of radio for her next appearance, on Tallulah Bankhead's big-budget, large-scale radio variety show, The Big Show, in November 1950, sharing the bill with Groucho Marx and Jane Powell. In one routine, Snooks asks Bankhead for advice on becoming an actress, despite Daddy's insistence that Snooks has no acting talent. Death Six months after her Big Show appearance, on May 29, 1951, Fanny Brice died in Hollywood of a cerebral hemorrhage. She was 59.

The May 29, 1951 episode of The Baby Snooks Show was broadcast as a memorial to the star who created the brattish toddler, crowned by Hanley Stafford's brief on-air eulogy: "We have lost a very real, a very warm, a very wonderful woman." Brice was cremated. Her ashes were interred in the Chapel Mausoleum at the Jewish Home of Peace Cemetery in East Los Angeles, California. A half-century later, at the time of Brice's daughter Frances' death in 1992, Fanny Brice's ashes were reinterred at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemeteryin Los Angeles, some 20 miles west of her original interment place. Today, the ashes, and those of her daughter, are in an outdoor pavilion. Source: Wikipedia

Question: US comedian, singer and actress Fania Borach, born in October 1891, was better known by what name?
Answer: Fanny Brice