Bert Lahr Autograph Vintage signature on album page

Guaranteed Authentic for Life.

Lahr made his starring film debut in the 1931 movie adaptation of Flying High, but never truly caught on as a screen personality, possibly because his gestures and reactions were too broad for the comparatively intimate medium of films. Lahr's greatest screen performance -- indeed, one of the greatest performances ever captured on celluloid -- was as the Cowardly Lion in the perennial favorite The Wizard of Oz (1939). In the mid-1950s, Lahr gained a latter-day reputation as a sensitive dramatic actor when he was co-starred with

For all his onstage buffoonery, Lahr was an intensely troubled, unhappy man, a fact driven home in Notes on a Cowardly Lion, a biography written by Lahr's son, theatre critic John Lahr. After making more money than he'd ever seen in his life as star of a series of potato chip commercials, Bert Lahr was cast as Professor Spats in the nostalgic 1967 film The Night They Raided Minsky's; Lahr died of cancer during production, forcing the producers to use a double for the actor in several scenes.