B: September 12, 1901 in Montréal, Québec
D: March 7, 1975 in Hollywood, California
Ben Blue started out in life as Benjamin Bernstein and emigrated to the United States where he became a dance instructor and dance school owner as well as a nightclub owner. His career, which spanned 50 years in show business, began when he was just 15-years-old in a Montreal tryout for the George M. Cohan’s musical comedy Irene. He went on to perform on the American vaudeville circuit during the 1920s then in 1926 he appeared in the first of a series of silent comic shorts for Warner Bros., Hal Roach and other Hollywood studios. It is said that Warner Bros. animator Chuck Jones used him as inspiration for one of his earliest cartoon creations, Conrad the Cat. At the Hal Roach Studios he was featured in the Taxi Boys comedy shorts. He worked at the Paramount Studios in the 1930s, and later at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The large gap in his career in the 1950s is the period when he essentially dropped out of the film business to concentrate on managing the nightclubs he owned. He did continue to appear on a number of TV shows and regularly in nightclubs, but he didn’t restart his film career until the 1960s when he began making comedic cameo appearances in such films as Stanley Kramer’s It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World and Norman Jewison’s The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming. Ben Blue died in hospital in the Los Angeles neighbourhood of Westlake following a long illness. |
Features & TV Movies: What Price Taxi (1932) For Me and My Gal (1942) The Land of OZ (TV-1960) TV Series – Cast: Accidental Family (1967-1968) |
