Fanny Brice

• Born: October 29, 1891
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: May 29, 1951
• Place of death: Los Angeles, California

Actor, entertainer, and singer

Brice was a versatile performer, appearing in every phase of show business, from burlesque to vaudeville to films to radio. She was known for portraying stock Jewish characters on the stage.

Areas of achievement: Entertainment; music; theater

Early Life

Fanny Brice (FAN-nee bris) was born Fania Borach in 1891 in New York City, the daughter of saloon owner Charles Borach and Rose Stern. She was the third of four children. The family moved among Manhattan’s lower East Side, Harlem, and Newark, New Jersey. Brice claimed to have been expelled from or run away from several schools, until she quit at the age of fourteen. Her heart was set on a show-business career, and she had been singing in amateur contests since she was thirteen. She also may have danced in her father’s saloon. Still in her midteens, she procured a job in a Broadway revue, but she was fired before the show opened. Her next venture was burlesque. A tall and gangly young lady, she adopted the surname of Brice, supposedly after a friend of her mother. Her younger brother Lew, who followed her into show business, also adopted that surname. By the time she was sixteen, Brice had found some small success in touring companies, and by nineteen she was on Broadway to stay. She also married for the first time, to Frank White, but the marriage was annulled, presumably on the grounds that she was not of age.

Life’s Work

For an Irving Berlin musical, Brice performed a song in a Yiddish accent, something that was to become a lasting part of her repertoire. Theater impresario Florenz Ziegfeld signed her for the 1910 edition of his famous Follies, a revue in which she was to appear several times until the mid-1920’s. Because of her gawky height and prominent nose, Brice was destined to shine primarily in comic roles, although she could perform love ballads as movingly as any of the best female singers. Her philosophy as a comic actor was that she had to be likable as well as funny. Along with her Broadway roles Fanny also appeared in vaudeville, becoming popular in England as well. She eventually appeared at the Palace Theater in New York, the venue that was considered the acme of vaudeville fame.

In 1918, Brice married again; her new husband was gambler Jules Arnstein, known as Nicky. The marriage remained secret for a couple of years and endured until 1927. It produced a son and a daughter, but it was a troubled one and ended in divorce. Brice had supported Nicky through his many legal problems, including prison terms in Sing Sing and Leavenworth. Finally, it was his infidelities that proved too much for her to bear. Another unfortunate marriage was later undertaken with impresario Billy Rose, and this also ended in divorce. In the mid-1930’s she returned to the Follies, produced by the Shubert brothers after Ziegfeld’s death, and scored a great success. Brice also did a few dramatic stage roles, but these did not prove popular with her fans.

In 1928, Brice began to appear in films, but cinema did not prove to be a strong suit. In a sense, her talent was too big to be captured on a film screen, and she said that she could never forget a camera was focused on her. Cast in only six films, at least one of which seems to be lost, she often was called on to repeat her stage routines and to not be a central part of the plot line. Her films were My Man (1928), Night Club (1929), Be Yourself! (1930), The Great Ziegfeld (1936), Everybody Sing (1938), and The Ziegfeld Follies (1946). More famous than the films in which she appeared were those about her, foremost being the popular (but largely inaccurate) Funny Girl in 1968, previously a Broadway musical. It was produced by Brice’s son-in-law and starred Barbra Streisand, who won an Academy Award for her portrayal. The sequel, Funny Lady, came out in 1974. The 1939 motion picture Rose of Washington Square was also supposedly based on Brice’s life. She sued Twentieth Century-Fox for defamation for having made it without her permission.

To audiences who never saw Brice on the stage or in the films, she was better known as the bratty but endearing “Baby Snooks” on the radio. The character was based on a sketch she had performed many years before in the Follies. At first Brice performed “Snooks” as a part of other stars’ radio programs, but she ultimately had a series of her own, beginning in the late 1940’s. Although no longer the top headliner she had been for most of her storied career, she continued to work and was performing the “Snooks” role at the time of her death in 1951 from a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of fifty-nine.

Significance

Although she changed her name to one that sounded non-Jewish, red-haired Brice certainly did not conceal her heritage; in fact, she reveled in it, at least professionally. She often told stories with a Jewish theme and used a heavy Yiddish accent frequently. The first song associated with her, “Sadie Salome, Go Home,” was about a young Jewish girl who goes on the stage, much as Brice did. Although her exaggerated Jewishness might seem politically incorrect or even offensive by some standards, in her heyday such ethnic humor was commonplace and acceptable. Even some non-Jewish performers made their livings as professional “Hebrews.” In an era when very few women had significant careers as comic performers, Brice was world famous. She was so renowned that, in 1923, when she had the famous Brice nose straightened, it was a major news event.

Bibliography

Goldman, Herbert F. Fanny Brice: The Original Funny Girl. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Relates the facts of Brice’s life without a deep examination of her private self.

Green, Stanley. The Great Clowns of Broadway. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. This account of great stage comedians contains an entry on Brice.

Grossman, Barbara Wallace. Funny Woman: The Life and Times of Fanny Brice. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Published one hundred years after her birth, this objective biography of Brice does not delve deeply into her interior life.

Katkov, Norman. The Fabulous Fanny: The Story of Fanny Brice. New York: Knopf, 1953. The first biographical account published after Brice’s death contains much material from her unpublished autobiography and some oral history.