Other famous showcases for his singing and dancing skills include the Herbert Ross movies Pennies from Heaven (1981) with Steve Martin, and the award winning 2001 Fatboy Slim video for “Weapon of Choice” directed by Spike Jonze. An Elvis fanatic since his teenage years, Walken would later play the King in a self-penned show called Him in 1995. He was in 1962 Off-Broadway revival of Best Foot Forward with Liza Minnelli, a 1963 tour with West Side Story, the 1964 Broadway premiere of High Spirits (an adaptation of Blithe Spirit with Tammie Grimes and Beatrice Lillie) and a night club act with former ice skater Monique Van Vooren (she’s the one who suggested the name change to Christopher). He also took dance classes as a kid, and had about a year at Hofstra, a school that turned out many a future star, but dropped out because he was already getting work in the theatre.Ī lot of Walken’s early work was of the song and dance variety. In a New York Times interview he claimed that he once worked as a lion tamer in the circus, and I want that to be true so badly, so I’ll just run with it. In 1958 Walken appeared on Broadway in the U.S. As a boy, he appeared in sketches on the Colgate Comedy Hour alongside Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, and was cast as a regular in the short-lived sitcom The Wonderful John Acton starring Harry Holcombe (later familiar in Country Time lemonade commercials). His own given name, Ronald, was in honor of Ronald Colman.
Walken and his two brothers Kenneth and Glenn (VERY Scottish names), were baptized into show business by their agressive stage mom. Later the family moved farther out onto the island to Bayside, just a stone’s throw from where your correspondent resides.
Walken credits the accented speech of his parents, along with his many immigrant neighbors in Astoria, Queens, for his own strangely, staccato, halting, but musically expressive speech patterns. When I learned about his early career as a child star, it tipped the balance in favor of a post here.īoth of Walken’s parents were immigrants, the father from Germany and the mother from Scotland (the same ethnic combo as a certain ex-president who was indicted on 30 counts of business fraud yesterday, but with a much more fortunate result. He’s done a great deal of theatre in addition to the better known film work, and (rare for someone who’s done that) lots of straight-up show biz, as a song and dance man and sketch comedian.
But the volume and variety of his accomplishments are impressive when you add them up. Pop culture has done Walken a disservice, I think, by making him a sort of punchline, largely due to impressions by comedians like Kevin Pollak and Jay Mohr, and the actor’s own willingness to engage in self-parody, making hay out of his unique voice, visage and personality. Born this day 80 years ago, Ronald “Christopher” Walken (b.
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