Paul Muni

• Born: September 22, 1895
• Birthplace: Lemberg, Galicia, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Lviv, Ukraine)
• Died: August 25, 1967
• Place of death: Montecito, California

Ukrainian-born actor

During the 1930’s, when Americans sought escape from the deprivations of the Great Depression, Muni made an impression in films with his intense, magnetic, and engrossing performances.

Early Life

Paul Muni (MYEW-nee) was born on September 22, 1895. His parents, Salche and Nacham Favel Weisenfreund, were itinerant Yiddish entertainers, who traveled throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire, performing short Yiddish plays and song-and-dance routines. An unsuccessful tour in England in 1901 prompted their emigration to the United States in 1902.

Muni, called by the common Yiddish nickname “Moony,” started acting at age twelve, playing an old man, replacing another actor at the last minute in a play. He continued acting, often playing old men on the Yiddish stage. Yiddish theater actors spoke their lines in a “more elegant” Germanized Yiddish than everyday Yiddish. The acting style was broad rather than realistic, exhibiting more temperament and an almost operatic intensity. Improvisation was considered a useful talent, even adding lines from other plays into the dialogue.

In 1919, Muni joined theYiddish Art Theater, founded by Maurice Schwartz, and performed in several plays, including Sholem Aleichem’s Shver Tsu Zein a Yid (1914). He met his future wife, actor Bella Finkel, during this time, and they married in May, 1921, two years before Muni became an American citizen. He began his English-speaking theater-acting career in 1926, playing an elderly Jewish man in We Americans (1926). By this time, he was listed in the playbills as Muni Wisenfrend.

Life’s Work

Muni continued his Broadway stage work with a play in 1927, still using the name Muni Wisenfrend. Then in 1928, he was lured to Hollywood to work with Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Barbara Stanwyck, Cary Grant, and Claudette Colbert. Muni was handsome, with black hair and eyes, and a well-proportioned 165 pounds. However, he was only five feet, ten inches tall, so he wore small lifts in his shoes to add to his height. When he made the film Scarface (1932), he even added padding to give himself the bulk he felt the character warranted. A perfectionist in preparing for his roles, he spent considerable time researching the historical personages he often portrayed in his films, reading books about the character and the era, rehearsing the correct dialect in order to speak his lines with the proper accent. He would remain in character even when not in a scene. He tried to “become” the person he was portraying, and he became one of the finest character actors of his time.

His first film, a talkie titled The Valiant (1929), earned him an Academy Award nomination, the first of five he would receive over his career. This was the first time he used the name “Paul Muni.” He was not, however, satisfied with the kind of roles he was being offered, and so he returned to Broadway, taking a lead role in the Elmer Rice play Counsellor-at-Law in 1931. In 1932, he was back in Hollywood, where he made two breakout films, Scarface and I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), the latter in an Academy Award-nominated role.

He signed a long-term contract with Warner Bros. His association with the studio produced some of his most memorable films, including The Life of Emile Zola(1937). As Zola, he gave the powerful, moving “J’accuse” speech that convinced many he was one of Hollywood’s best actors. He also made Juarez (1939) and The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936), for which he received an Academy Award for Best Actor. Still, his career included only twenty-five films; they produced five Academy Award nominations (and one write-in nomination for his performance in 1935’s Black Fury). He was one of the biggest Hollywood stars in the 1930’s, but after a dispute with Warner Bros., his contract was terminated. From 1940 through the 1950’s, he made only eight films.

Muni went back to Broadway in 1955. He played the part of Henry Drummond in the play Inherit the Wind (1955), and he was awarded the Tony for best performance by a leading actor in a drama. He retired in 1959, when a lifelong rheumatic heart condition and increasing blindness began to hamper his work. At age seventy-one, he succumbed to a heart disorder and died in Montecito, California.

Significance

Before World War II, Hollywood, though run largely by Jews, was “almost venomously anti-Semitic,” according to actor Marlon Brando, and Jewish actors invariably had to change their names and alter their physical features that were “too Jewish.” Though Muni had been successful in the Yiddish theater and on the Broadway stage under the name Muni Wisenfrend, when he got to Hollywood he acted under the name Paul Muni. The name change, however, did not change his concern for his fellow Jews, especially those European Jews who wanted to make their home in Israel. He was committed to the cause of creating a Jewish state in Israel. Brando said Muni gave an “astonishing performance” in one of his last Broadway roles, in A Flag Is Born (1946). Muni was considered an actor of great integrity.

Bibliography

Brody, Seymour. Jewish Heroes and Heroines of America. Hollywood, Fla.: Frederick Fell, 2005. Muni’s story is among this illustrated collection of true stories.

Druxman, Michael B. Paul Muni: His Life and His Films. New York: A. S. Barnes, 1974. Covers Muni’s private life and his various acting roles.

Lawrence, Jerome. Actor: The Life and Times of Paul Muni. New York: Samuel French, 1982. Account of Muni’s life from his childhood, when he traveled with his parents’ Yiddish theater company, to his declining years. Includes interviews with theater and film greats who knew or worked with Muni.

Phillips, Alastair, and Ginette Vincendeau, eds. Journeys of Desire. London: British Film Institute, 2008. Muni is discussed as a European actor who became an American stage and film star.