Madeline Kahn was an American actress, comedienne and singer.
She was an Emmy Award and Tony Award winner.
Kahn was best known for her comedic roles in such films as What's Up, Doc?, Paper Moon,(
both directed by Peter Bogdanovitch), Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, High Anxiety
and History of the World, Part I.
For Paper Moon and Blazing Saddles, she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting
Actress.
She won a Daytime Emmy Award in 1987 for ABC Afterschool Special, and having previously
been nominated for the Tony Award for the 1978 revival of On the Twentieth Century and
the 1989 revival of Born Yesterday, she won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play
for the original 1992 production of The Sisters Rosensweig.
Her other films included The Cheap Detective, City Heat, Clue and Nixon.
Early life Kahn was born Madeline Gail Wolfson in Boston,
the daughter of Bernard B. Wolfson, a garment manufacturer, and his wife, Freda.
She was raised in a non-observant Jewish family.
Her parents divorced when Kahn was two, and she and her mother moved to New York City.
In 1953, Freda married Hiller Kahn—who later adopted Madeline—and eventually changed
her name to Paula Kahn.
Kahn had two half-siblings: Jeffrey and Robyn.
In 1948, Kahn was sent to a progressive boarding school in Pennsylvania and stayed there until
1952.
During that time, her mother pursued her acting dream.
Kahn soon began acting herself and performed in a number of school productions.
In 1960, she graduated from Martin Van Buren High School in Queens, where she earned a
drama scholarship to Hofstra University on Long Island.
At Hofstra, she studied drama, music, and speech therapy.
After changing her major a number of times, Kahn graduated from Hofstra in 1964 with a
degree in speech therapy.
She was a member of a local sorority on campus, Delta Chi Delta.
Career When asked on television by Kitty Carlisle
and Charles Nelson Reilly how she began the opera aspect of her career she said, "It's
so hard to determine exactly when I began or why, singing.
The Muse was definitely not in attendance.
I'll tell you exactly."
She was a singing waitress at a Bavarian restaurant called Bavarian Manor, a Hofbräuhaus in upstate
New York, while she was a college student, to earn money.
She sang musical comedy numbers during shows.
There was a really important customer there, a big Italian man, who shouted out to me,
'Sing Madame Butterfly,' and of course he didn't mean the whole opera.
He meant that one very popular aria, 'un Bel Di'.
So if I was to come back the next summer to earn more money during the next year I'd better
know that aria.
You know, and I didn't know anything about it; I just learned that one aria and a few
others and then one thing led to another and I studied that, and I discovered that I could
sing that, sort of, that way.
But my first actual thing that I did was Candide for Leonard Bernstein's 50th birthday at Philharmonic
Hall - at the time that's what it was called.
And I don't know if that was an opera but it was very hard to sing.
I actually have done 'Musetta' in La Bohème a long time ago in Washington DC.
I mean, utterly terrifying.
I mean basically I feel as though I was asked to do it and I did it.
1960s Kahn began auditioning for professional acting
roles shortly after her graduation from Hofstra; on the side, she briefly taught public school
in Levittown, New York.
Just before adopting the professional name Madeline Kahn, she made her stage debut as
a chorus girl in a revival of Kiss Me, Kate, which led her to join Actors' Equity.
Her part in the flop How Now, Dow Jones was written out before the 1967 show reached Broadway,
as was her role as Miss Whipple in the original production of Promises, Promises.
She earned her first break on Broadway with Leonard Sillman's New Faces of 1968.
In 1968, she also performed her first professional lead in a special concert performance of the
operetta Candide in honor of Leonard Bernstein's 50th birthday.
In 1969, she appeared Off Broadway in the musical Promenade.
1970s She appeared in two Broadway musicals in the
1970s: a featured role in Richard Rodgers' 1970 Noah's Ark-themed show Two by Two and
a leading lady turn as Lily Garland in 1978's On the Twentieth Century.
She left the latter show early in its run, yielding the role to her understudy, Judy
Kaye.
She also starred in a 1977 Town Hall revival of She Loves Me.
Kahn's film debut was in the 1968 short De Düva.
Her feature debut was as Ryan O'Neal's hysterical fiancée in Peter Bogdanovich's screwball
comedy What's Up, Doc? starring Barbra Streisand.
Her film career continued with Paper Moon, for which she was nominated for an Academy
Award for Best Supporting Actress.
Kahn was cast in the role of Agnes Gooch in the 1974 film Mame, but star Lucille Ball
fired Kahn due to artistic differences.
A close succession of Kahn comedies — Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, and High Anxiety
— were all directed by Mel Brooks, who many Hollywood observers claimed was able to bring
out the best of Kahn's comic talents.
Their last collaboration was 1981's History of the World, Part I.
For Blazing Saddles, she was again nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.
In the April 2006 issue of Premiere magazine, her performance as Lili von Schtüpp in Saddles
was selected as #74 on its list of the 100 greatest performances of all time.
In 1978, Kahn's comic screen persona reached another peak with Neil Simon's The Cheap Detective,
a spoof of both Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon, directed by Robert Moore.
1980s Kahn's roles were primarily comedic rather
than dramatic, though the 1970s found her originating roles in two plays that had both
elements: 1974's In the Boom Boom Room and 1977's Marco Polo Sings a Solo.
After her success in Brooks' films, she played in a number of less successful films in the
1980s.
Her less remembered roles included First Lady Mrs. Link in the 1980 spoof First Family.
She appeared in The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother opposite Gene Wilder,
the animated film My Little Pony: The Movie, the holiday farce Mixed Nuts and a cameo in
1979's The Muppet Movie.
In 1983, she starred in her own short-lived TV sitcom, Oh Madeline, which ended after
only one season due to poor ratings.
In 1986 she starred in ABC Comedy Factory's pilot episode of Chameleon, which never aired
on the fall schedule.
In 1987, Kahn won a Daytime Emmy award for her performance in the ABC Afterschool Special
Wanted: The Perfect Guy.
1990s Late in her career, Kahn returned to the stage,
first in the role first embodied by Judy Holliday, in the 1989 revival of Born Yesterday.
Later she played Dr. Gorgeous in Wendy Wasserstein's 1993 play, The Sisters Rosensweig, a role
which earned her a Tony Award.
Kahn played Molly Ringwald's mother in the 1990 film Betsy's Wedding.
Kahn played the corrupt mayor in a concert performance of Anyone Can Whistle.
She appeared in Nixon as Martha Beall Mitchell.
She continued to appear in movies.
In the early 1990s, Kahn recorded a voice for the animated movie The Magic 7.
Her most notable role at that time was on the sitcom Cosby as Pauline, the eccentric
neighbor.
She also voiced Gypsy the moth in A Bug's Life.
Kahn received some of the best reviews of her career for her Chekhovian turn in the
1999 independent movie Judy Berlin, her final film.
Illness and death Kahn developed ovarian cancer in 1998.
She underwent treatment and continued to work on Cosby and married John Hansbury in October
1999.
The disease spread rapidly, and she died on December 3, 1999.
Her body was cremated.
A bench dedicated to her memory was erected in Central Park by her husband John Hansbury
and her brother Jeffery Kahn.
Work Filmography
Theatre Television
Awards and nominations Award wins:
1984 People's Choice Awards for Best Actress in a New Television Series for Oh Madeline,
ABC 1987 Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Performer
in Children's Programming for ABC Afterschool Special
1993 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for The Sisters Rosensweig
Award nominations: 1973 Golden Globe for Most Promising Newcomer
for What's Up, Doc?
1974 Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress for Paper Moon
1974 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Paper Moon
1974 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for In the Boom Boom Room
1975 Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress for Young Frankenstein
1975 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Blazing Saddles
1978 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical for On the Twentieth Century
1989 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for Born Yesterday
In 2003, Madeline Kahn was posthumously inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame.
References
External links Madeline Kahn at the Internet Broadway Database
Madeline Kahn at the Internet Off-Broadway Database
Madeline Kahn at the Internet Movie Database Madeline Kahn at TV Tropes
Madeline Kahn, a retrospective