Born March 20, 1922 in The Bronx, New York City, New York, USA Height 6' 1?" (1.87 m) Mini Bio (1) Carl Reiner is a legend of American comedy, having achieved great success as a comic actor, a director, producer and recording artist. He has won nine Emmy Awards, three as an actor, four as a writer and two as a producer. He also won a Grammy Award for his "2,000 Year Old Man" album, based on his comedy routine with Mel Brooks. Reiner was born in The Bronx, to Bessie (Mathias) and Irving Reiner, a watchmaker. His father was an Austrian Jewish immigrant and his mother was a Romanian Jewish immigrant. At the age of sixteen, while working as a sewing machine repairman, he attended a dramatic workshop sponsored by the Works Progress Administration. The direction of his life was set. In the 1970s, some sources claimed that Reiner made his movie debut in New Faces of 1937 (1937), but that is unlikely as he would have only been 15 years old at the time. (the movie shares the same plot as his erstwhile partner Mel Brooks' 1968 classic, The Producers (1967), with a crooked producer planning to fleece his "angels" by producing a flop and absconding with the money). He didn't appear on screen, silver or small, until he made his TV debut in 1948 in the short-lived TV series, The Fashion Story (1948), then became a regular, the following year, on The Fifty-Fourth Street Revue (1949), another TV series with a brief life. Reiner made his Broadway debut in 1949 in the musical "Inside U.S.A.", a hit that ran for 399 performances. His next Broadway show, the 1950 musical revue, "Alive and Kicking", was a flop, lasting just 43 performances. Max Liebman, the producer/director/writer/composer, had been called in to provide additional material after the show's troubled six week out-of-town preview in Boston. It didn't help -- the show closed after six weeks on Broadway -- but an important contact had been made. Leibman was a producer-director on Your Show of Shows (1950), one of the great
