Mel Brooks was born Melvyn Kaminsky in Brooklyn, New York, on June 28, 1926.
He lived in Brooklyn until joining the army during World War II. In the army,
he performed in troop revues. When he returned to the United States, he worked
as a stand-up comic for a short time at resorts in the Catskill Mountains,
where many New York comedians went to hone their skills. Brooks took a job
writing for the legendary television program Your Show of Shows, with
other writers that included Carl Reiner, Woody Allan, and Neil Simon. He went
with the star of the show, Sid Caesar, to his followup program, Caesar’s
Hour. After winning an Emmy award for his writing, Brooks struck out to
produce and direct his own works. He and Reiner had some success in the early
1960s with their character The 2000 Year Old Man, which spawned a hit
comedy album and led to a series of concert engagements.
In 1964 Brooks married Anne Bancroft, a famous film and stage actress. Their
marriage has lasted for over forty years. In 1965 he wrote and produced, along
with Buck Henry, the situation comedy Get Smart, which ran on network
television for five years.
Brooks’s first film was a short independent work called The Critic.
His second film, in 1968, was The Producers, for which he won an Oscar
for best original screenplay. In 1974 he created what many consider to be his
greatest comedy, Blazing Saddles, a spoof of westerns. That began a
golden age for him, with a series of popular film parodies: Young
Frankenstein in 1974, which played off of the Universal monster movies of
the 1930s; Silent Movie in 1977, a tribute to the silent era of film;
and High Anxiety in 1977, which parodies the films of director Alfred
Hitchcock. Brooks’s comedies in the 1980s and 1990s were considered uneven in
quality and were poorly received by audiences, although 1987’s
Spaceballs was so popular that studios considered producing a sequel,
but Brooks dropped the idea.
Brooks has also been influential as a producer in Hollywood. In addition to
his own films, his production company, Brooksfilms Limited, has backed such
critically acclaimed films as 84 Charring Cross Road, Frances,
and The Elephant Man.
Brooks has often written songs for his own films, such as the original
‘‘Springtime for Hitler’’ number for the 1968 film of The Producers, but
he never considered writing for the stage until David Geffen, one of the
founders of Dreamworks SKG studio, urged him to adapt his movie. His work has
earned Antoinette Perry (‘‘Tony’’) Awards for the play’s music and for
co-writing the book with Thomas Meehan, a longtime collaborator who is best
known for writing the book for Annie.
