Muni, Paul

(1895-1967)

   A native of Lemberg, Austria, Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund immigrated with his parents, Yiddish theatre actors, to Cleveland, Ohio, in 1902. He made his debut in Yiddish theatre in 1908, often cast as a female or old man, but in 1920 Muni was hired as leading man by the Yiddish Art Theatre to appear in Sholom Aleichem's Hard to Be a Jew. Muni began acting on Broadway in 1930, appearing in two failures, This One Man (1930) and Rock Me, Julie (1931), before scoring a major success as Jewish lawyer George Simon in Elmer Rice's Counsellor-at-Law* (1931), after which he embarked on a distinguished Hollywood career in such classic motion pictures as Scarface (1932), I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), The Story of Louis Pasteur (1935), The Good Earth (1937), and The Life of Emile Zola (1937). Muni returned to the stage periodically, notably as army deserter King McCloud in Maxwell Anderson's Key Largo* (1939) and as Henry Drum-mond, the character based on Clarence Darrow, in Jerome Lawrence* and Robert E. Lee's* Inherit the Wind* (1955).