Chico Marx

Chico Marx was an American comedian, actor, and pianist who was the eldest of the four performing Marx Brothers, the comedy team whose 1920s vaudeville work and 1929–1949 film output produced one of the foundational documents of American screen comedy. He was born Leonard Marx on March 22, 1887, in New York City, New York. His father Sam "Frenchie" Marx was an Alsatian-Jewish tailor, and his mother Minnie Schoenberg Marx was a German-Jewish vaudeville manager who organized her sons' early stage careers.

He grew up in the Yorkville neighborhood of Manhattan's Upper East Side. His childhood piano lessons — taken with money his mother could ill afford — produced the comic Italian-immigrant piano-playing routine that became his stage signature.

His role as the fast-talking, faux-Italian con-man Chico in the Marx Brothers' 1929 Paramount film The Cocoanuts — adapted from their 1925 Broadway hit — launched the brothers' film career. His subsequent appearances in Animal Crackers (1930), Monkey Business (1931), Horse Feathers (1932), and Duck Soup (1933) extended their Paramount run.

The brothers' move to MGM produced A Night at the Opera (1935) and A Day at the Races (1937), generally considered their finest films. His lifelong gambling habit — which produced large debts that periodically required his brothers' financial intervention — was an open secret among Hollywood industry insiders. He led his own dance band in the 1940s after the Marx Brothers' film output wound down. He married Betty Karp in 1917 (divorced 1940) and Mary De Vithas in 1958. He died on October 11, 1961, at age 74, in Hollywood, California, of arteriosclerosis.

His name Chico was a stage nickname (originally spelled "Chicko" for his fondness for chasing "chicks") that displaced his given name Leonard in public use. Chico functions as a Spanish and Portuguese diminutive of Francisco.