Groucho Marx's wisecracking persona was born when audiences booed his German accent
In vaudeville, Julius Marx played a comic German with a heavy accent. After the Lusitania went down in 1915, crowds turned hostile and booed the character. He dropped the accent and invented the rapid-fire smart aleck that made Groucho one of America's great comedians.
He was born Julius Henry Marx in Manhattan on 2 October 1890, the third of the Marx boys, in a Jewish family. His mother, Minnie, had arrived from Dornum in northern Germany at 16, and his father came from Alsace, which is why the sons called him Frenchie. Julius joked that he was named after a jobless uncle in hopes of an inheritance, yet the man left only a celluloid dicky, a pool ball and three razor blades.
Minnie was determined her boys would follow her brother, Al Shean of the vaudeville duo Gallagher and Shean, onto the stage. Julius had hoped to become a doctor, but money troubles pulled him out of school at twelve. In July 1905 he debuted as a boy singer in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and by 1909 his mother had built a family singing act billed as the Four Nightingales. It struggled, often in poor venues and barely paid.
Comedy happened almost by accident. After a miserable show in Nacogdoches, Texas, the brothers started clowning onstage to amuse themselves, and the audience preferred them that way. They reworked a school-room sketch into Fun In Hi Skule and toured versions of it for seven years. Accents were standard fare: Chico adopted an Italian voice to fool bullies, and Harpo, uneasy talking onstage, took Uncle Al's advice to go silent.
The brothers became the biggest comedy draw at New York's Palace Theatre and landed three Broadway hits before Hollywood came calling. Their first film, a 1921 silent, was screened once in the Bronx and probably destroyed. Groucho eventually made 26 films, 13 with Chico and Harpo, prowling with a crouched lope, painted moustache and cigar. In 1949, after half a century on stage, television relaunched him as host of You Bet Your Life. He died on 19 August 1977.
Source: Groucho Marx
