Mel Brooks

Mel Brooks is an American filmmaker, actor, comedian, and composer whose seven-decade career has produced one of only 19 EGOT-class performers in American entertainment history — winning the Emmy (1967, plus four subsequent Emmys), Grammy (1999), Oscar (1969 Best Original Screenplay for The Producers), and Tony (2001 Best Musical for The Producers) Awards. He was born Melvin James Kaminsky on June 28, 1926, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York City, into a working-class Brooklyn-Jewish family. His father Maximilian Kaminsky was a Polish-Russian-Jewish immigrant from Gdańsk, Poland (who died of kidney disease in 1929 when Mel was two), and his mother Kate Brookman was a Russian-Jewish immigrant.

His U.S. Army service across 1944–1946 — including his late-1944 European Theater service in the 1104th Engineer Combat Battalion — shaped his subsequent later autobiographical narrative. His 1949 transition to professional comedy writing — initially under his birth-name Mel Kaminsky on the Borscht Belt Catskill Mountains comedy circuit — produced his 1950 hiring as a writer on Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows NBC TV variety show. His 1950–1954 Your Show of Shows writing-staff service alongside fellow writers Neil Simon, Carl Reiner, Larry Gelbart, and Woody Allen launched his early-career American comedy-writing public profile.

His 1965 co-creation of NBC's spy-comedy TV series Get Smart with Buck Henry — which ran 138 episodes across 1965–1970 — launched his 1960s American TV public profile. His 1968 first directed feature film The Producers — for which he won the 1969 Best Original Screenplay Academy Award at age 42 — launched his 1970s American film-comedy public profile.

His 1970s American film-comedy peak produced multiple defining American films — particularly Blazing Saddles (1974), Young Frankenstein (1974, opposite Gene Wilder), Silent Movie (1976), High Anxiety (1977, the Hitchcock-parody), History of the World, Part I (1981), and Spaceballs (1987, the Star Wars parody). His 2001 Broadway musical adaptation of The Producers — for which he wrote the book, music, and lyrics — won 12 Tony Awards (the most Tony Awards ever won by a single Broadway production at its 2001 release). He was married to actress Anne Bancroft from 1964 until her June 6, 2005 death from uterine cancer.

His name Mel began as the diminutive of Melvin (from the Old English root meaning "council protector"). Mel was a popular American boys' name through the mid-20th century.