Lou Jacobi Dies at 95

Actor Lou Jacobi, who enjoyed a 40+ year career on stage and screen, has passed away at the age of 95 years old on October 23, 2009 in Manhattan. 

Lou Jacobi grew up in Toronto and started his acting career in local Jewish theatre when he was only 12-years-old playing a violin prodigy in The Rabbi and the Priest. Jacobi did, in fact, play the violin, then and for most of his life.

He also worked as a stand-up comic in Muskoka in the late 1940s before being cast to appear in the musical-comedy revue, Spring Thaw. In the early 1950s he tried his luck in England appearing in the stage productions of American musicals like Guys and Dolls and Pal Joey. He was part of a Royal command performance at the London Palladium in 1952. It was in England that he made his film debut with Is Your Honeymoon Really Necessary? in 1953, a British comedy that starred England's blond sex symbol, Diana Dors. Jacobi eventually found his way to New York and Broadway.

He made his debut on Broadway in 1955 in The Diary of Anne Frank, playing a less-than-noble occupant of the Amsterdam attic where the Franks were hiding. It ran for two-and-a-half years, and Jacobi went on to be one of only three cast members to also appear in the 1959 film version.

He won parts in Come Blow Your Horn from the then up-and-coming playwright Neil Simon, and in Woody Allen's Don't Drink the Water. He was in a total of only 10 Broadway productions including The Sunshine Boys (1974) and Cheaters in 1978. From his career on film he was usually remembered for playing the philosophical bartender in Irma la Douce (1963), or the young hero's unsophisticated uncle in My Favorite Year (1982).