Raymond Wallace Bolger
Ray Bolger
Motion Pictures Category Star
- Ceremony was on February 8, 1960
Ray Bolger
Television Category Star
- Ceremony was on February 8, 1960
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Ray Bolger
'Wizard of Oz' star Ray Bolger dies
'Scarecrow' joined troupe down Yellow Brick Road
By Richard de Atley Associated Press
LOS ANGELES - Ray Bolger, who as the rubber-legged Scarecrow helped lead Dorothy back home in the 1939 movie Wizard of Oz, died Thursday of cancer. He was 83.
Bolger, the last survivor of the cheerful foursome that trouped down the Yellow Brick Road, died at a Los Angeles nursing home, said family spokesman Barry Greenberg.
The lean, loose-limbed Bolger preferred to think of himself as a comedian, rather than a dancer, and his stage, screen, and television career spanned six decades.
BUT HE was best known for his role as the Scarecrow in the 1939 movie. As the man of straw, Bolger seemed a boneless sack og rags and weeds, flopping about with merry abandon as he searched for a brain unaware of his own healthy reserves of common sense.
The film, which starred Judy Garland as Dorothy, Jack Haley as the Tin Man and Bert Lahr as the Cowardly Lion, remains a perennial television favorite.
Bolger said in later years that he had no idea the movie would become a Hollywood classic - though it was his personal favorite.
"I knew that I was taking part in a strange kind of adventure, he said "Everything had to be invented for the picture - the effects, the sound, the Technicolor. It was all new. But when the reviews came out, it was a terrific disappointment. The picture got terrible notices.
"It was only when The Wizard of Oz came into the home with television that it redeemed itself. Then, it was no longer a picture, it was an institution. After all, The Wizard of Oz carries the message that there's no place like home."
MARGARET HAMILTON, who played the Wicked Witch of the West, died in 1985. Miss Garland, who portrayed the misty-eyed, sweet-voiced girl from Kansas, died in 1969 of an accidental overdose of sleeping pills. Haley died in 1979, Lahr in 1967, and [https://www.eatlife.net/stars/frank-morgan.php], who portrayed the wizard, died in 1949.
Raymond Wallace Bolger was born Jan. 10, 1904, in Boston and first became interested in dance when he discovered that his moves on the floor did not impress his date for the high school prom. He avidly attended the theater, and picked up pointers on tap from a bank night watchman.
Bolger continued his dance studies and by 1924 was on the vaudeville stage, where he met Gwen Rickard, whom he married in 1929. She survives him, They had no children.
BOLGER SPENT two years on Broadway in George White's Scandals of 1931, and got good reviews in Life Begins at 8:40, which ran from 1934-35.
Stardom came in 1936, when he appeared in On Your Toes, a musical choreographed by the late master George Balanchine. Critics found Bolger both eccentric and superb in the role, which included the celebrated and exhausting dance number Slaughter on Tenth Avenue.
After Broadway came Hollywood and roles in The Great Ziegfeld, Rosalie, Sweethearts, The Wizard of Oz, and Sunny. But Bolger found that he couldn't stretch his legs and his talents as much as he wished in Hollywood, so he returned to New York, where he starred in Keep off the Grass, the Rogers and Hart musical By Jupiter, Three to Make Ready, and Where's Charley?
During World War II, he helped organize USO tours of remote bases.
BOLGER INSISTED that he was not primarily a dancer.
"I was hired as a comedian in my first show and I'm still a comedian. I became a dancer in self-defense. I was doing a comedy monologue and didn't know how else to get off, so I danced off. I've been dancing ever since, but I'm still a comedian."
Bolger starred in the NBC-TV music and comedy show Washington Square in the late 1950s and traveled for months each year well past middle-age, no longer lean but delighting audiences with his soft-shoe and tap routines.
He was elected to the Theater Hall of Fame in 1980, and the same year departed from his usual routines to play a dour Catholic Church dignitary in The Runner Stumbles.
A funeral mass was tentatively set for Monday evening at Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills, with burial Tuesday at Holy Cross Cemetery.
