Zero Mostel
From Philosopedia
Mostel, Zero (Samuel Joel) (28 Feb 1915 - 8 Sep 1977)
One of eight children, Mostel was Brooklyn-born and raised in the Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
As a child interested in drawing, he took his pad and colored pencils to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to copy the paintings, then attended art classes at the Educational Alliance, a Jewish organization that worked with Jewish immigrant families—Louise Nevelson, Ben Shahn, and Adolph Gottlieb also were students there.
After graduating in 1935 from the City College of New York, he studied art at New York University, then took on odd jobs, including in 1937 working with the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to support himself.
In 1939, he married a classmate at City College, Clara Sverd. But the marriage was plagued by irreconcilable personality conflicts, especially over Mostel's artistic ambitions. They separated in 1941 and divorced three years later.
He made his Broadway debut in Keep ‘em Laughing (1941). At Café Society Downtown, he secured a job in 1942 as a comedian, where the club’s press agent, Ivan Black, dubbed him Zero for, “After all, here’s a guy who’s starting from nothing.”
Although he was in the Army briefly, he was discharged perhaps because of his left-wing politics but for medical reasons. However, he entertained American troops overseas and, in 1944, married a former Radio City Music Hall Rockette, Kathryn Harkin. The marriage to a Gentile upset his rigidly Orthodox Jewish parents and, although at times it was tumultuous, they had two sons: Josh in 1946, Tobias in 1949.
After World War II, Zero did stand-up in nightclubs, then acted in plays like Beggars Holiday and films like Panic in the Streets. In one irreverent satire, he played a pompous reactionary, Senator Polltax T. Pellagra, which made him a target for rightwing anti-Communists. Called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, he denied he was a Communist and refused to name names, resulting in his being blacklisted for much of the 1950s.
In 1958, his friend Burgess Meredith cast Mostel as Leopold Bloom in Ulysses in Nightgown, and he won an Obie, the Off-Broadway equivalent of a Tony.
Two yeas later he was run over by a bus, remained hospitalized for five months, and underwent four operations to avoid prevent amputation of his leg. Gaining use of his leg, he starred in Rhinoceros in 1960, winning a Tony. He then reestablished himself as a star in Tony-winning performances in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and Fiddler on the Roof.
By 1975 he was not working steadily, and although he was offered the title role of Shylock in Arnold Wesker’s pro-Jewish version of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, Mostel died from an aortic aneurysm. Theatergoers remembered him for his expressive face, large body, but graceful movement. His 1965 autobiography was titled Zero by Mostel. According to his wife, his last wish was that he wanted to be cremated “like Einstein” with no funeral or memorial service.
In 2009 Jim Brochu wrote and performed Zero Hour, in which he tells Mostel's "heartbreaking and riotous, always illuminating" story, wrote Nadine Epstein and John O'Leary in a 21 September 2009 review of the play.
(See a Times review of Zero Hour.)
