Danny Kaye

Danny Kaye — actor with roots in the Russian Empire

Danny Kaye was born David Daniel Kaminsky in Brooklyn on 18 January 1911, though he later gave the year as 1913. His parents, Jacob and Clara Kaminsky, née Nemerovsky, were Russian Jewish immigrants who had left Yekaterinoslav, in the Russian Empire, now Dnipro in Ukraine, with their two elder sons, Larry and Mac, two years before he was born. He was the only one of their sons born in the United States; his father worked as a tailor.

He went to Public School 149 in East New York, later named after him, and to Thomas Jefferson High School, which he left without graduating. His mother died when he was in his early teens, and he soon ran away to Florida with a friend. He worked in vaudeville and, from 1935, in two-reel comedy shorts, in which he usually played a fast-talking Russian. With his wife, the songwriter and pianist Sylvia Fine, who wrote many of his patter songs, he played the nightclub La Martinique, where Moss Hart saw him.

Hart cast him as Russell Paxton in the Broadway musical Lady in the Dark, which opened on 21 January 1941. His show-stopper was Kurt Weill and Ira Gershwin's "Tschaikowsky (and Other Russians)", in which he rattled off the names of about fifty Russian composers, real and invented, in less than a minute. Samuel Goldwyn then made him a film star, beginning with Up in Arms (1944) and continuing with The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947). Later films included Hans Christian Andersen (1952), White Christmas (1954) and The Court Jester (1955). He received an honorary Academy Award in 1955 and hosted The Danny Kaye Show on CBS from 1963 to 1967, which won four Emmys and a Peabody Award.

In 1954 he became the first ambassador-at-large of UNICEF, travelling widely for the organisation until his death, and in later years conducted symphony orchestras in comic fundraising concerts. He played a Holocaust survivor in the television film Skokie (1981). He received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1982 and the Légion d'honneur in 1986 for his UNICEF work. He died in Los Angeles on 3 March 1987, aged seventy-six, and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously that June.

Tracing the roots — Yekaterinoslav, Yekaterinoslav Governorate (now Dnipro, Ukraine)

Born David Daniel Kaminsky in Brooklyn to Jacob and Clara (née Nemerovsky) Kaminsky, Russian Jewish immigrants who had left Yekaterinoslav, now Dnipro in Ukraine, with their two elder sons two years earlier; he was their only child born in America.

Historical context

Russian Empire · c. 1721–1917

Yekaterinoslav, Yekaterinoslav Governorate (now Dnipro, Ukraine). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.

Map: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA)

A career defined by ambition