Madeline Kahn

Madeline Gail Kahn (née Wolfson; September 29, 1942 – December 3, 1999) was an American actress, comedian, and singer. She was known for her comedic roles in films directed by Peter Bogdanovich and Mel Brooks, including What's Up, Doc? (1972), Young Frankenstein (1974), High Anxiety (1977), History of the World, Part I (1981), and her Academy Award–nominated roles in Paper Moon (1973) and Blazing Saddles (1974).

Kahn made her Broadway debut in Leonard Sillman's New Faces of 1968, and received Tony Award nominations for the play In the Boom Boom Room in 1974 and for the original production of the musical On the Twentieth Century in 1978. She starred as Madeline Wayne on the short-lived sitcom Oh Madeline (1983–84) and won a Daytime Emmy Award in 1987 for an ABC Afterschool Special. She received a third Tony Award nomination for the revival of the play Born Yesterday in 1989, before winning the 1993 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for the comedy The Sisters Rosensweig. Her other film appearances included The Cheap Detective (1978), Yellowbeard (1983), City Heat (1984), Clue (1985), and Nixon (1995).

Kahn was born on September 29, 1942 in Boston, the daughter of Bernard B. Wolfson, a garment manufacturer, and his wife Freda (née Goldberg). She was raised in a nonobservant Jewish family. Her parents divorced when Kahn was two, and she moved with her mother to New York City. In 1953, Freda married Hiller Kahn, who later adopted Madeline; Freda eventually changed her own name to Paula Kahn. Madeline Kahn had two half-siblings: Jeffrey (from her mother's marriage to Kahn) and Robyn (from her father's second marriage).

In 1948, Kahn was sent to the progressive Manumit School, a boarding school in Bristol, Pennsylvania. During that time, her mother pursued her acting dream. Kahn soon began acting and performed in a number of school productions. In 1960, she graduated from Martin Van Buren High School in Queens, New York, and then earned a drama scholarship to Hofstra University on Long Island. At Hofstra, she studied drama, music, and speech therapy. Kahn graduated from Hofstra in 1964 with a degree in speech therapy. She was a member of a local sorority on campus, Delta Chi Delta. ^{[citation needed]} She later studied singing in New York City with Beverley Peck Johnson.

When asked on television by Kitty Carlisle and Charles Nelson Reilly how she began the opera aspect of her career, Kahn said:

It's so hard to determine exactly when I began or why, singing. The Muse was definitely not in attendance. I'll tell you exactly.

To earn money while a college student, Kahn was a singing waitress at a Bavarian restaurant named Bavarian Manor, a Hofbrau in New York's Hudson Valley. She also sang musical comedy numbers during shows.

There was a really important customer there, a big Italian man, who shouted out to me 'Sing Madame Butterfly', and of course he didn't mean the whole opera. He meant that one very popular aria, "Un Bel Di". So, if I was to come back the next summer to earn more money during the next year, I'd better know that aria. You know, and I didn't know anything about it; I just learned that one aria and a few others and then one thing led to another and I studied that, and I discovered that I could sing that, sort of, that way. But my first actual thing that I did was Candide for Leonard Bernstein's 50th birthday at Philharmonic Hall—at the time that's what it was called. And I don't know if that was an opera, but it was very hard to sing. I actually have done Musetta in La Bohème a long time ago in Washington, DC. I mean, utterly terrifying. I mean, basically I feel as though I was asked to do it and I did it.