M. Cohan

George Michael Cohan, born July 3, 1878, in Providence, Rhode Island, to Irish Catholic parents, was an American entertainer who worked across multiple disciplines as a playwright, composer, lyricist, actor, singer, dancer, and theatrical producer. He died on November 5, 1942. His baptismal certificate from St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Church recorded his birth date as July 3, though Cohan and his family consistently maintained he had been born on the Fourth of July.

Both of Cohan's parents were traveling vaudeville performers, and he joined them on stage as an infant, initially serving as a prop before learning to dance and sing. By age 8 he had begun performing on the violin and then as a dancer. His father was Jeremiah "Jere" Cohan, his mother was Helen "Nellie" Costigan Cohan, and his sister was Josephine "Josie" Cohan Niblo. Together the four performed as the vaudeville act known as The Four Cohans, touring primarily from 1890 to 1901. In 1890, Cohan also toured as the star of a production called Peck's Bad Boy before rejoining the family act. He and his sister made their Broadway debuts in 1893 in a sketch titled The Lively Bootblack, the same year Cohan sold his first songs to a national publisher.

During summers away from the vaudeville circuit, the family stayed at his grandmother's home in North Brookfield, Massachusetts, where Cohan befriended baseball player Connie Mack. Those summers informed his 1907 musical 50 Miles from Boston, set in North Brookfield and containing the song "Harrigan." When Cohan returned to the town in 1934 as part of the cast of Ah, Wilderness!, he told a reporter, "I've knocked around everywhere, but there's no place like North Brookfield."

While still a teenager, Cohan wrote more than 150 original skits and songs for the family's vaudeville and minstrel performances. In 1901 he wrote, directed, and produced his first Broadway musical, The Governor's Son, for The Four Cohans. His breakthrough came in 1904 with Little Johnny Jones, which introduced "Give My Regards to Broadway" and "The Yankee Doodle Boy." From 1904 to 1920, working alongside his partner Sam H. Harris, Cohan created and produced more than 50 musicals, plays, and revues on Broadway, with productions running simultaneously in as many as five theatres. Among the works he produced with Harris were It Pays to Advertise in 1914 and Going Up in 1917, the latter becoming a hit in London the following year. In 1912, Cohan and Harris acquired Chicago's Grand Opera House, renaming it George M. Cohan's Grand Opera House; it was later renamed Four Cohans Theatre in 1926 before reverting to its original name in 1928 when Cohan divested the property to the Shubert family.

One of his notable 1913 productions was a dramatization of the mystery Seven Keys to Baldpate, which became a hit despite initially puzzling audiences and critics. Cohan adapted it as a film in 1917, and it was subsequently adapted for film six additional times, as well as for television and radio. That same year, 1913, he appeared on Broadway in the musical All Aboard. Over the course of his career, Cohan wrote more than 50 shows and published more than 300 songs, among them "Over There," "You're a Grand Old Flag," "Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway," and "Mary Is a Grand Old Name." "Over There" became America's most popular World War I song, recorded by Nora Bayes and Enrico Caruso, among others, and achieved such widespread recognition that a ship was named "Costigan," after Cohan's grandfather Dennis Costigan, with the song played during its christening. As a composer, Cohan was among the early members of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers.

Following a dispute with Actors' Equity Association in 1919, Cohan stepped away from acting for a period. In 1925 he published his autobiography, Twenty Years on Broadway and the Years It Took to Get There. He returned to the stage in 1930 in The Song and Dance Man, a revival of his tribute to vaudeville and his father. In 1932 he appeared in the Hollywood musical film The Phantom President, playing a dual role as a corrupt politician and his idealistic campaign double; the film co-starred Claudette Colbert and Jimmy Durante, featured songs by Rodgers and Hart, and was released by Paramount Pictures. He made one additional sound film, Gambling in 1934, based on his own 1929 play and shot in New York City, which is now considered a lost film.

During the 1930s, Cohan earned recognition as a serious dramatic actor, appearing in Eugene O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness! in 1933 and portraying a song-and-dance President Franklin D. Roosevelt in Rodgers and Hart's I'd Rather Be Right in 1937. That same year he reunited with Harris to produce Fulton of Oak Falls, in which Cohan also starred. His final play, The Return of the Vagabond in 1940, featured a young Celeste Holm in the cast, and he continued performing as a headline artist until that year.

In 1940, Judy Garland appeared in a film version of Cohan's 1922 musical Little Nellie Kelly. In 1942, the musical biopic Yankee Doodle Dandy was released, with James Cagney's performance in the title role earning the Academy Award for Best Actor. The film was screened privately for Cohan while he was in the final stages of abdominal cancer; he responded to Cagney's portrayal by saying, "My God, what an act to follow!" Cohan died on November 5, 1942. His life and music were also depicted in the 1968 musical George M!. A statue in Times Square, New York City, stands as a permanent commemoration of his contributions to American musical theatre.