Jimmy Durante

Jimmy Durante was born James Francis Durante on February 10, 1893, on New York's Lower East Side, the youngest of four children of Italian immigrants Bartolomeo and Rosa Durante. His father cut hair on Catherine Street, and Jimmy left school after seventh grade to play ragtime piano in Coney Island and Bowery saloons. By his late teens he was leading the Original New Orleans Jazz Band at the Alamo Café in Harlem, where his outsized nose earned him the lifelong nickname "Schnozzola."

In 1923 he opened the Club Durant on West 58th Street with singer Eddie Jackson and dancer Lou Clayton; the Clayton, Jackson and Durante trio became Broadway's loudest after-hours draw and headlined the 1929 Ziegfeld production Show Girl. Hollywood signed him in 1930, and he appeared in more than three dozen films, including The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942), Two Sisters from Boston (1946), and It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), often stealing scenes with his gravel growl and the catchphrase "I got a million of 'em!"

Radio and television widened his audience further. The Jimmy Durante Show ran on NBC radio from 1943 to 1950 and on television from 1954 to 1956, and his sign-off line "Goodnight, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are" entered the American vernacular. His 1961 recording of "As Time Goes By" was rediscovered after its use in the 1993 film Sleepless in Seattle and reached a new generation.

He won a Peabody in 1950 and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award posthumously in 1999. Durante died of pneumonia on January 29, 1980, in Santa Monica, survived by his second wife Margie Little and adopted daughter CeCe.

The name Jimmy is the English pet form of James, traced through Late Latin Iacomus to the Hebrew Yaaqov; he wore its masculine meaning "supplanter," shared with the patriarch Jacob.