Milton Berle

Milton Berle was born Mendel Berlinger on July 12, 1908 in Harlem, New York, the fourth of five children of Moses Berlinger, a paint and varnish salesman, and Sarah Glantz, a department-store detective. His mother pushed him into show business early and he won a Charlie Chaplin lookalike contest at age five. He appeared as a child actor in silent films from 1914, including a small role in The Perils of Pauline.

He worked the vaudeville circuit through his teens and twenties as a stand-up comic, building a reputation for fast-paced gag delivery and a willingness to recycle other comedians' material that earned him the nickname "the Thief of Bad Gags." By the late 1930s he was headlining Broadway revues and hosting radio programs, including Three Ring Time and The Milton Berle Show on NBC.

NBC put him in front of a television camera on June 8, 1948 as host of Texaco Star Theater, a Tuesday-night variety hour. The show became the first major hit of American network television. At its peak in 1950 and 1951 it drew an estimated eighty percent of all U.S. television viewers on Tuesday nights, sold sets nationwide, and earned him the nicknames "Mr. Television" and "Uncle Miltie." He famously appeared in drag in many sketches.

He signed a thirty-year exclusive contract with NBC in 1951, an arrangement unmatched in broadcasting at the time, though his ratings declined after 1953 as competing networks counter-programmed against him. He hosted The Buick-Berle Show and The Milton Berle Show through 1956, returned in various specials, and acted in films including It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963). He was an inaugural inductee of the Television Hall of Fame in 1984. He died on March 27, 2002 in Los Angeles.

The name Milton comes from an Old English place-name combining myln ("mill") and tūn ("settlement"), meaning "settlement by the mill." He adopted it as his masculine stage name, anglicizing the Yiddish-Germanic Mendel Berlinger of his birth.