Joel Grey
Joel Grey (born April 11, 1932, Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.) is an American actor, singer, and dancer who was best known for his riveting performance as the depraved and worldly master of ceremonies in the Kander and Ebb musical Cabaret, in both the 1966 stage version and the 1972 film adaptation.
Grey was the son of the popular comic musician Mickey Katz. As a child, Grey was a member of the Curtain Pullers, the children’s theatre branch of the Cleveland Play House, and at the age of nine he played Pud in the Play House’s staging of On Borrowed Time. The Katz family later moved to Los Angeles, and, as a teen, Grey began performing in his father’s revue, the Borscht Capades. The entertainer Eddie Cantor saw the show when it was in Florida, and he engaged Grey to perform on the television show The Colgate Comedy Hour (1951–54). Grey went on to perform in several such shows, and he became a nightclub performer as well. He made his film debut in the musical About Face (1952). After playing the title role in a televised play, Jack and the Beanstalk, in 1956, he made guest appearances on many TV shows. In addition, he stepped in as an understudy in the Broadway plays Come Blow Your Horn (1961), Stop the World—I Want to Get Off (1962), and Half a Sixpence (1965).
About 1965, producer and director Harold Prince approached Grey with the idea of casting him as the master of ceremonies in a musical derived from Christopher Isherwood’s book The Berlin Stories and the play inspired by that book, John Van Druten’s I Am a Camera. Grey’s creation of the character brought him critical accolades and a Tony Award, one of several earned by Cabaret. He also created the title role in the musical George M! (1968), about the entertainer George M. Cohan, and that performance earned him a Tony Award nomination. Grey later played Cohan in a 1970 TV adaptation of the play. The 1972 film version of Cabaret won eight Academy Awards, one of which (for best supporting actor) went to Grey. He also earned a Golden Globe Award and the BAFTA Award for most promising newcomer for his performance. He was again nominated for a Tony Award for his performance in the lead role of Goodtime Charley (1975).
Grey played the title character’s producer in Robert Altman’s Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson (1976), and he also appeared in Herbert Ross’s The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976). He starred on Broadway in The Grand Tour (1979), which, though well reviewed, ran only 61 performances, and he portrayed a Korean martial-arts master in the comic action film Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins (1985), a performance that brought him a Golden Globe nomination. He later played Amos Babcock Bellamy in a 1995 film adaptation of the evergreen musical The Fantasticks, and he took the part of Amos Hart in a 1996 Broadway revival of the musical Chicago. Grey’s other films included The Empty Mirror (1996), in which he played Joseph Goebbels; Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark (2000); Choke (2008); and tick, tick…BOOM! (2021), a musical directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda.
On Broadway Grey portrayed the Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 2003–04 in Wicked, played Moonface Martin in Anything Goes (2011–12), codirected a Tony Award-winning production of Larry Kramer’s play The Normal Heart (and was himself nominated for a Tony), and played Firs in the 2016 production of The Cherry Orchard. In addition, Grey made frequent TV appearances, notably in the 2001 miniseries Further Tales of the City and on Buffy the Vampire Slayer (2001), Oz (2003), and Alias (2005). In 2019 he joined a star-studded cast in The Investigation: A Search for the Truth in Ten Acts, a dramatic reading of the so-called Mueller report, which documented the investigation of possible Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election of 2016. Grey portrayed Jeff Sessions, who was attorney general in 2017–18.
Grey’s daughter, Jennifer, also became an actor, popular for her role as Baby Houseman in Dirty Dancing (1987).