Fittingly known to be a "Leo" for his horoscope, Bert Lahr is always remembered as the Cowardly Lion in (and the farmer "Zeke") The Wizard of Oz. But during his acting career, he has been known for being in burlesque, vaudeville, and Broadway.

Dropped out of high school at the age of fifteen for a juvenile vaudeville act, Lahr worked his way up to the top billing of the Columbia Burlesque Circuit. When in Broadway, Lahr usually plays a comic actor in plays which he starred in such as the classic routine The Song of the Woodman, which he would later perform in Merry Go Round of 1938.

Aside from The Wizard of Oz, Lahr's movie career never caught on because his gestures and reactions were too broad. Lahr died in 1967.


Best known as the cowardly lion in The Wizard of Oz (1939). Bert Lahr's son, John Lahr, is now a drama critic with The New Yorker. He began seeing his future second wife Mildred in the early 1930s while his first wife was institutionalized. Mildred left him in March 1936 and married another man because he would not divorce his first wife. Mildred left her first husband by the end of 1936 and went back to Lahr, who obtained a divorce from his first wife a year later. His first wife, Mercedes, was mentally ill and lived in an asylum beginning in 1930. Judy Garland heard of Lahr's death as she was about to go on stage in Las Vegas. At her performance that night, she dedicated "Over the Rainbow" to the memory of Lahr, or, as she referred to him on that occasion, "my beloved Cowardly Lion.". Father of Jane Lahr. According to his son John Lahr in "Notes on a Cowardly Lion" (the official biography), Lahr had terminal cancer but did not know it when he signed to do "The Night They Raided Minsky's." He agreed to shoot an extensive night scene outdoors in New York City on a cold December night, leading to the pneumonia that was the immediate cause of his death. His completed scenes were left in the film, which was edited around them.