Gertrude Berg

Gertrude Berg
As Molly Goldberg in 1951.
Born	Tillie Edelstein (1899-10-03)October 3, 1899 East Harlem, Manhattan, NYC, U.S.
Died	September 14, 1966(1966-09-14) (aged 66) Manhattan, New York City, U.S.
Occupation	Actress, screenwriter
Years active	1929–1961
Spouse(s)	Lewis Berg (1918–1966; her death)
Children	2

Gertrude Berg (October 3, 1899 – September 14, 1966) was an American actress, screenwriter and producer. A pioneer of classic radio, she was one of the first women to create, write, produce and star in a long-running hit when she premiered her serial comedy-drama The Rise of the Goldbergs (1929), later known as The Goldbergs. Her career achievements include winning a Tony Award and an Emmy Award, both for Best Lead Actress.

Berg was born Tillie Edelstein in 1899 in the East Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, to Jacob and Diana Edelstein, natives of Russia and England, respectively. Berg's chronically unstable mother, Dinah, grieving over the death of her young son, experienced a series of nervous breakdowns and later died in a sanitarium.

Tillie, who lived with her family on Lexington Avenue, married Lewis Berg in 1918; they had two children, Cherney (1922–2003) and Harriet (1926–2003). She learned theater while producing skits at her father's Catskills Mountains resort in Fleischmanns, New York.

After the sugar factory where her husband worked burned down, she developed a semi-autobiographical skit, portraying a Jewish family in a Bronx tenement, into a radio show. Though the household had a typewriter, Berg wrote her script by hand, taking the pages this way to a long-awaited appointment at NBC. When the executive she was meeting with protested that he could not read what Berg had written, she read the script aloud to him. Her performance not only sold the idea for the radio program but also got Berg the job as the lead actress on the program she had written. Berg continued to write the show's scripts by hand in pencil for as long as the program was on the air.

On November 20, 1929, a 15-minute episode of The Rise of the Goldbergs was first broadcast on the NBC radio network. She started at $75 a week. Less than two years later, in the heart of the Great Depression, she let the sponsor propose a salary and was told, "Mrs. Berg, we can't pay a cent over $2,000 a week." Berg's husband, Lewis, who became a successful consulting engineer after the loss of his job which prompted her to write the initial radio script, refused to be photographed with his wife for publicity purposes, as he felt this was infringing on her success.