Cohan, George M.: translation
(1878-1942)
Born in Providence, Rhode Island, to vaudevillian parents, George Michael Cohan went on stage as a toddler and continued to the end of his life. He gained his first success as part of the Four Cohans, his family's vaudeville act (including his father Jerry, mother Helen, and sister Josephine), touring in Daniel Boone (1888) and in Peck's Bad Boy (1890). By the late 1890s, he was a major figure of the burgeoning Broadway theatre as composer, lyricist, librettist, producer (often with his longtime partner, Sam H. Harris), director, and star of popular musicals, plays, and revues.
In 1911, Cohan opened the George M.Cohan Theatre, and often veered from musicals to write straight plays, even though the first of these, Popularity (1906), flopped. Other nonmusical works include Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford (1911), Broadway Jones (1912), Seven Keys to Baldpate (1913), The Miracle Man (1914), Hit-the-Trail Holliday (1915), The Tavern (1921), Madeleine and the Movies (1922), The Song and Dance Man (1923), American Born (1925), The Home Towners (1926), The Baby Cyclone (1927), Whispering Friends (1928), Gambling (1929), Friendship (1931), Pigeons and People (1933), and Fulton of Oak Falls (1937). The Return of the Vagabond (1940), a failed sequel to The Tavern, marked Cohan's last Broadway appearance.
When Cohan's later works declined in popularity, he acted to acclaim in two productions he did not write, Eugene O'Neill's only comedy, Ah, Wilderness!* (1933), and George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart's* musical satire (with music by Richard Rodgers and lyrics by Lorenz Hart) lampooning Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, I'd Rather Be Right (1937). Cohan appeared in a few silent motion pictures of his plays, and also acted in The Phantom President (1932) and Gambling (1934) in the "talkies." Near the end of his life, Cohan was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his songs "Over There" and "You're a Grand Old Flag," and he was the subject of a lavish (and highly fictional) biographical film, Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942).