George Givot

George David Givot (February 18, 1903 – June 7, 1984) was a Russian-born American comedian and actor whose career spanned Broadway, vaudeville, film, television, and radio. Born in Ekaterinoslav (now Dnipro, Ukraine) in the Russian Empire, he was brought to the United States in 1906 when his family, headed by his parents Walf and Sofya Givistinsky, settled in Omaha, Nebraska, according to the 1910 census. The family later relocated to Chicago, where Givot attended high school and college. His career in entertainment began when a night school journalism instructor, exasperated by his classroom antics, directed him to a radio station manager who offered him work on late-night broadcasts. Bandleader Paul Ash subsequently heard Givot perform and provided his entry into vaudeville.

Givot became one of the earliest Greek dialect comedians in American entertainment, a specialty he traced to his time working as a soda jerk in a Greek candy store in Omaha, where he picked up elements of the language. He cultivated a comedic persona built around a fake Greek dialect and was billed as the "Greek Ambassador of Good Will." His Broadway career extended from 1929 to 1960 and encompassed a range of productions across multiple genres.

His first notable Broadway role came in Mae West's play The Constant Sinner, which ran for 64 performances from September to November 1931. West had originally sought to cast Lorenzo Tucker, a Black actor, as her character's lover, but the racial climate of the era made this untenable, and Givot was cast in blackface instead. The producers required him to remove his wig at the close of every performance to make clear to the audience that he was white. Two years later, Givot appeared in the 1933 Gershwin musical Pardon My English, which had been conceived to showcase English music hall performer Jack Buchanan. When Buchanan proved unable to credibly portray the lower-class German character Golo Schmidt, Givot replaced him in the role. Alongside Josephine Huston, he introduced the Gershwin song "Isn't It a Pity?" during the show's brief run before it closed. He also appeared in the revue Earl Carroll's Sketch Book in 1935.

Givot had considerably more success with the 1944 Cole Porter musical Mexican Hayride, in which he was one of the featured performers. Al Hirschfeld drew a caricature of Givot and other cast members. It was during this production that he met Dorothy Durkee, who played a character that pursued his own, and whom he married on December 1, 1945. His Broadway work also included the musical Do Re Mi, among other productions.

In film, Givot made his debut in The Chief in 1933 and went on to appear in comedy shorts, musicals, and dramas over the following decades. Warner Bros. and Vitaphone featured him in a series of Big V Comedies during the 1930s, and MGM cast him in the 1934 Technicolor short Roast-Beef and Movies alongside Curly Howard in an attempt to develop its own comedy trio. He starred in the 1942 musical Flying with Music and appeared in the war film China Gate in 1957. His most widely recognized screen work came through voice acting: as Tony in the Walt Disney animated feature Lady and the Tramp (1955), he introduced the Sonny Burke and Peggy Lee song "Bella Notte," serenading the film's central characters in the picture's most celebrated sequence.

On television, Givot served as the original host of Bonnie Maid Versa-Tile Varieties, which premiered on NBC on Friday evenings beginning in 1949, though he was replaced after approximately two months. He appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show twice in 1958, on May 11 and July 27. In radio, he had his own program at various points in his career and was among the panelists when Stop Me If You've Heard This One was revived in 1947.

In his personal life, Givot married actress Maryon Curtis in 1937; the couple divorced in 1941. His second marriage, to Dorothy Durkee, took place in 1945. George Givot died of a heart attack on June 7, 1984, in Palm Springs, California, and was interred in California.