Ben Blue

Ben Blue, born Benjamin Bernstein on 12 September 1901 in Montreal, Quebec, emerged from a modest Jewish immigrant family to become one of North America's most recognizable slap‑stick comedians and character actors. At the age of nine his family moved to Baltimore, where he quickly displayed a talent for mimicry, winning a contest for the best impersonation of Charlie Chaplin and setting the stage for a lifelong career in performance. By fifteen he was already touring with a vaudeville troupe, later serving as stage manager and assistant general manager, and eventually opening his own nightclubs, a venture that would later intertwine his comedic persona with entrepreneurial ambition. In the 1920s he joined Jack White and His Montrealers, a comedic orchestra where his drumming was punctuated with corny jokes and a fake beard, and the group’s relocation to the United States led to appearances in early sound shorts such as the Vitaphone film Jack White and His Montrealers and the Technicolor revue King of Jazz (1930). The early 1930s saw him adopt the stage name Ben Blue, a moniker he felt would fit theater marquees better than Bernstein, and he briefly starred in Hal Roach’s “Taxi Boys” series before moving to Paramount and MGM, lending his goofy, bald‑headed “dumb‑bell” character to films like The Big Broadcast of 1938 and Easy to Wed. Television in the 1950s brought a short‑lived The Ben Blue Show and regular spots on The Frank Sinatra Show, while his nightclub enterprises—most notably Slapsie Maxie’s in Hollywood and later Ben Blue’s in Santa Monica—made him a staple of the West Coast entertainment circuit despite a disastrous loss of $25,000 at the Reno Dollhouse. A 1964 federal tax‑evasion indictment stemmed from the Santa Monica club, culminating in a no‑contest plea and a suspended $1,000 fine after a five‑year legal battle. Blue continued to appear in popular TV series such as The Jack Benny Program, The Milton Berle Show, and Jerry Van Dyke’s Accidental Family, and his film cameo as the biplane pilot in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) and as the town drunk in The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (1966) cemented his status as a beloved character actor. His personal life included two marriages—first to Mary Blue, with whom he had a daughter Jeanne before divorcing in 1937, and later to Axie Mae Dunlap, mother of his sons Tom and Robert—resulting in three children. Ben Blue died on 7 March 1975 in Los Angeles and was interred at Hillside Memorial Park Cemetery; his papers from 1935‑1955 now reside in UCLA’s Special Collections, preserving the legacy of a man whose career spanned nearly six decades across stage, screen, and nightclubs.