Known For: Hungarian actor (1883–1955)
Category: Actors
Occupation: actor, screenwriter, stage actor, film actor
Country: Hungary
City: Budapest
Date of Birth: Friday, 02 February 1883
Died: 1955-02-12 00:00:00 in Q34006
Language English
Szőke Szakáll, known in the English-speaking world as S. Z. Sakall, was a Hungarian-American stage and film character actor. He appeared in many films, including Casablanca (1942), in which he played Carl, the head waiter; Christmas in Connecticut (1945); In the Good Old Summertime (1949); and Lullaby of Broadway (1951). Sakall played numerous supporting roles in Hollywood musicals and comedies in the 1940s and 1950s. His rotund cuteness caused studio head Jack Warner to bestow on Sakall the nickname "Cuddles".
| BirthPlace | Budapest |
| Wikipedia | S.Z._Sakall |
Gerő Jenő (later transcribed in English as Jacob Gero) was born in Budapest to a Jewish family. A sculptor's son, he was invalided out of the Hungarian army in World War I after a Russian bayonet wounded him in the chest. During his schooldays, he wrote sketches for Budapest vaudeville shows under the pen name Szőke Szakáll, meaning "blond beard", in reference to his own beard, grown to make him look older, which he affected when, at the age of 18, he turned to acting. In 1946, he became a United States citizen under the name of Jacob Gero (aka Szőke Szakáll). The actor became a star of the Hungarian stage and screen in the 1910s and 1920s. At the beginning of the 1920s he moved to Vienna, where he appeared in Hermann Leopoldi's Kabarett Leopoldi-Wiesenthal. In the 1930s he was, next to Hans Moser, the most significant representative of Wiener Film, the Viennese light romantic comedy genre. He also appeared in Berlin. He appeared in Familientag im Hause Prellstein (1927), Ihre Majestät die Liebe (1929, which was remade in Hollywood as Her Majesty, Love, with W.C. Fields in Sakall's role) and Two Hearts in Waltz Time (1930). For a brief period during this time, he ran his own production company.
