Molly Picon

Celebrated musical comedy entertainer who began her career with Philadelphia's Arch Street Theater in 1912, later becoming a beloved star of New York's Second Avenue Yiddish stage and a cross-over Broadway performer.

Petite and energetic, Picon worked prolifically in plays and vaudeville, making her Yiddish film debut in "Mazel Tov" (1924). In 1936 she traveled to Poland with Polish-born American director Joseph Green to star in the charming semi-musical "Yiddle With His Fiddle." Picon played an itinerant musician posing as a boy in order to travel the Polish countryside without sexual harassment. (The actress often used her slight stature and unglamorous looks to portray girls masquerading as boys.) While in Poland she also starred in Green's "Mamale" (1938) and, upon her return to the US, made a belated English-language starring debut in the Broadway play, "Morning Star." Picon spent much of the 1950s on tour with the USO and in various international fundraising efforts. The 1960s saw her career boosted by her spirited featured role in Jerry Herman's first Broadway musical, "Milk and Honey," which she soon followed with her English-language film debut as the mother of two playboy sons in Neil Simon's "Come Blow Your Horn" (1964). Picon played the definitive Jewish matchmaker, Yente, in "Fiddler on the Roof" (1971), and a bossy madam trying to recruit Barbra Streisand to prostitution in the comedy "For Pete's Sake" (1974). An indefatigable trouper, she continued to appear on stage in her one-woman show into her eighties.