Stars of Vaudeville #390: Imogene Coca

Most photos of Imogene Coca accentuate (usually with her help) her homeliness for comic effect. In the photo above, I was struck by how beautiful she was, and so I defy tradition by selecting it for this bio.

Coca (born this day in 1908) was a second generation vaudevillian; her father conducted pit orchestras; her mother was a dancer who’d started out as an assistant to magician Howard Thurston. Coca was taught to sing, dance and play piano from an early age, and began performing professionally at age nine. She worked with a succession of partners in small time vaudeville and night clubs for years and years before she began to get cast in Broadway revues in the 1930s. (Many of these were produced by her first vaudeville partner, dancer Leonard Sillman).

Her sketch comedy skills in these revues paved the way for what she is best known for, her work on television. She made her small screen debut as a regular on the short lived show Buzzy Wuzzy before her lucky casting on Sid Caesar’s Admiral Broadway Revue in 1949. This morphed into Your Show of Shows where she famously teamed with Caesar from 1950-1954. The show was ignominiously canceled in ’54. Thereafter Coca continued to be a familiar face in television guest spots and in summer stock and dinner theatre, and an occasional presence on Broadway. She was performing on stage as late as 1991. She passed away in 2001.

Here she is fooling around with Caesar in her heyday:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wEj9aSZZZo

To find out more about  the history of vaudeville, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.