He had three older brothers: Irving, Lenny, and Bernie. His father's family were German Jews from Danzig ( Gdańsk, Poland) his mother's family were Jews from Kyiv, in the Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire (present-day Ukraine). Early life and education īrooks was born on a tenement kitchen table, on June 28, 1926, in Brownsville, Brooklyn, New York City, to Kate ( née Brookman) and Max Kaminsky, and grew up in Williamsburg. In 2021, Mel Brooks published a memoir titled All About Me! Three of his films ranked in the American Film Institute's list of the top 100 comedy films of the past 100 years (1900–2000), all of which ranked in the top 15 of the list: Blazing Saddles at number 6, The Producers at number 11, and Young Frankenstein at number 13.

Their son Max Brooks is an actor and author, known for his novel World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (2006). He wrote and produced the Hulu series History of the World, Part II (2023).īrooks was married to actress Anne Bancroft from 1964 until her death in 2005. A musical adaptation of his first film, The Producers, ran on Broadway from 2001 to 2007 and was itself remade into a musical film in 2005. His best-known films include The Producers (1967), The Twelve Chairs (1970), Blazing Saddles (1974), Young Frankenstein (1974), Silent Movie (1976), High Anxiety (1977), History of the World, Part I (1981), Spaceballs (1987), and Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993). He wrote, with Buck Henry, the hit television comedy series Get Smart from 1965 to 1970.īrooks rose to prominence becoming one of the most successful film directors of the 1970s. With Carl Reiner, he created the comic character The 2000 Year Old Man and together they released several comedy albums starting with 2000 Year Old Man in 1960.

He began his career as a comic and a writer for Sid Caesar's variety show Your Show of Shows from 1950 to 1954 alongside Woody Allen, Neil Simon and Larry Gelbart. He received a Kennedy Center Honor in 2009, a Hollywood Walk of Fame star in 2010, the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2013, a British Film Institute Fellowship in 2015, a National Medal of Arts in 2016, and a BAFTA Fellowship in 2017. A recipient of numerous accolades, he is one of 18 entertainers to win the EGOT, which includes an Emmy Award, a Grammy Award, an Academy Award ('Oscar'), and a Tony Award. With a career spanning over seven decades, he is known as a writer and director of a variety of successful broad farces and parodies. Mel Brooks (born Melvin James Kaminsky June 28, 1926) is an American actor, comedian, and filmmaker.

The Long Shot by A.L. Brooks