Mel Brooks

Mel Brooks is an actor, comedian and filmmaker who has been working for over seven decades. He is known for creating broad farces and parodies. He began his career working on the Sid Caesar's variety show Your Show of Shows. He later went on to create the comic character The 2000 Year Old Man and wrote for the hit television comedy series Get Smart. In middle age, Brooks became one of the most successful film directors of the 1970s, with many of his films being among the top 10 moneymakers of the year they were released. His best-known films include The Producers, The Twelve Chairs, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Silent Movie, High Anxiety, History of the World, Part I, Spaceballs, and Robin Hood: Men in Tights. A musical adaptation of his first film, The Producers, ran on Broadway from 2001 to 2007 and was remade into a musical film in 2005. In 2001, he became an EGOT winner with his Tony Award wins for The Producers. He has also received a Kennedy Center Honor, a Hollywood Walk of Fame star, the 41st AFI Life Achievement Award, a British Film Institute Fellowship, a National Medal of Arts, and a BAFTA Fellowship. Three of his films ranked in the American Film Institute's list of the top 100 comedy films of the past 100 years. Brooks was married to actress Anne Bancroft from 1964 until her death in 2005. Their son Max Brooks is an actor and author, known for his novel World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War. In 2021, Brooks published a memoir, All About Me!.