Mel Brooks - Wikipedia

Mel Brooks (born Melvin Kaminsky,[2] June 28, 1926) is an American filmmaker, actor, comedian, and composer. He is known as a creator of broad film farces and comedic parodies. Brooks began his career as a comic and a writer for the early TV variety show Your Show of Shows. Together with Carl Reiner, he created the comic character The 2000 Year Old Man. He wrote, with Buck Henry, the hit television comedy series Get Smart, which ran from 1965 to 1970.

In middle age, Brooks became one of the most successful film directors of the 1970s, with many of his films being among the top 10 moneymakers of the year they were released. His best-known films include The Producers (1967), The Twelve Chairs (1970), Blazing Saddles (1974), Young Frankenstein (also 1974), Silent Movie (1976), High Anxiety (1977), History of the World, Part I (1981), Spaceballs (1987) and Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993).[3] A musical adaptation of his first film, The Producers, ran on Broadway, from 2001 to 2007.

In 2001, having previously won an Emmy, a Grammy and an Oscar, he joined a small list of EGOT winners with his Tony Award for The Producers. He received a Kennedy Center Honor in 2009, a Hollywood Walk of Fame star in 2010, the 41st AFI Life Achievement Award in June 2013, a British Film Institute Fellowship in March 2015, a National Medal of Arts in September 2016, and a BAFTA Fellowship in February 2017. Three of his films ranked in the American Film Institute's list of the top 100 comedy films of the past 100 years (1900–2000), all of which ranked in the top 15 of the list: Blazing Saddles at number 6, The Producers at number 11, and Young Frankenstein at number 13.[4]

Brooks was married to the actress Anne Bancroft from 1964 until her death in 2005. Their son Max Brooks is an actor and author, known for his novel World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (2006).

Brooks was drafted into the United States Army in 1944.[14] After scoring highly on the Army General Classification Test (a Stanford-Binet-type IQ test), he was sent to the elite Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP) at the Virginia Military Institute to be taught skills such as military engineering, foreign languages or medicine. Manpower shortages led the Army to disband the ASTP so Brooks returned to basic training at Fort Sill, Oklahoma in May 1944.[20][21]

Brooks served as a corporal in the 1104 Engineer Combat Battalion, 78th Infantry Division, defusing land mines as the allies advanced into Nazi Germany.[22][23] With the end of the war in Europe, Brooks took part in organizing shows for captured Germans and American forces.[24]