“Danny Kaye dead at 74”

Times Daily – Mar. 3, 1987

Danny Kaye, the versatile Brooklyn-reared comedian who sang, danced, mimicked, pantomimed and joked his way to Broadway, international and Hollywood fame, died early Tuesday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. He was 74.

A family spokesman said death was caused by a heart attack brought on by complications of internal bleeding and hepatitis. He had lived for many years in Beverly Hills. His wife, Sylvia, and daughter, Dena, were with him when he died at 3:58 a.m.

Kaye achieved fame on Broadway in “Lady in the Dark” in 1941, stopping the show with his machine-gun delivery of the comic patter-song “Tchaikovsky”—in which he managed to rattle off some 50 tongue-twisting Russian names in 39 seconds.

The real-life Danny Kaye was a lean, athletic six-footer with a strongly molded face, but much of his career was spent playing meek, milquetoasty screen characters who somehow triumphed in the end.

He was proud of the well-honed comic skills he brought to his roles, and insisted that he did not hunger for weightier dramatic fare.

“I wasn’t born a fool,” he once said, “It took work to get this way. I’m just an entertainer. All I want to be is funny. I never aspired to play Hamlet.”

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