|
Imogene Coca (November 18, 1908 – June 2, 2001) was an American comic actress best known for her role opposite Sid Caesar on ''Your Show of Shows''. Starting out in vaudeville as a child acrobat, she studied ballet and wished to have a serious career in music and dance, graduating to decades of stage musical revues, cabaret and summer stock. In her 40s, she began a celebrated career as a comedienne in television, starring in six series and guesting on successful television programs from the 1940s to the 1990s. She was nominated for five Emmy awards for ''Your Show of Shows'', winning Best Actress in 1951 and singled out for a Peabody Award for excellence in broadcasting in 1953. Coca was also nominated for a Tony Award in 1978 for ''On the Twentieth Century'' and received a sixth Emmy nomination at the age of 80 for an episode of ''Moonlighting''.〔 She possessed a rubbery face capable of the broadest expressions — ''Life'' magazine compared her to Beatrice Lillie and Charlie Chaplin, and described her characterizations as taking "people or situations suspended in their own precarious balance between dignity and absurdity, and push(ing) them over the cliff with one single, pointed gesture"—the magazine noted a "particularly high-brow critic" as observing, "The trouble with most comedians who try to do satire is that they are essentially brash, noisy and indelicate people who have to use a sledge hammer to smash a butterfly. Miss Coca, on the other hand, is the timid woman who, when aroused, can beat a tiger to death with a feather." Aside from vaudeville, cabaret, film, theater and television, she voiced children's cartoons and was even featured in an MTV music video by the band EBN-OZN, working well into her 80s. ==Early life== Born Emogeane Coca〔("Emogeane" was later changed to "Imogene" ), libraries.psu.edu; accessed May 12, 2014.〕 in Philadelphia, Coca was the daughter of Joseph Fernandez Coca, a violinist and vaudeville orchestra conductor, and Sadie Brady, a dancer and magician's assistant. Coca's father was of Spanish descent (the family surname was originally Fernández y Coca), the son of Joseph F. Coca, Sr., and his wife, Laura. Coca took lessons in piano, dance, and voice as a child and while still a teenager moved from Philadelphia to New York City to become a dancer. She got her first job in the chorus of the Broadway musical ''When You Smile'', and became a headliner in Manhattan nightclubs with music arranged by her first husband, Robert Burton. She gained prominence when she began to combine music with comedy; her first critical success was in ''New Faces of 1934''. A well-received part of her act was a comic striptease, during which Coca made sultry faces and gestures but would manage to remove only one glove. She committed this routine to film in the Educational Pictures comedy short ''The Bashful Ballerina'' (1937), and co-starred opposite another newcomer to films, Danny Kaye, in Educational's 1937 short ''Dime a Dance''. Both of these comedies were filmed in New York. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Imogene Coca」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|