Jimmie Durante

Jimmy Durante
Durante as host of The Hollywood Palace, 1964
Born	James Francis Durante (1893-02-10)February 10, 1893 Manhattan, New York, U.S.
Died	January 29, 1980(1980-01-29) (aged 86) Santa Monica, California, U.S.
Cause of death	Pneumonia
Other names	The Schnoz The Great Schnozzola
Occupation	Actor, comedian, singer, pianist
Years active	1920–1972
Political party	Democratic
Spouse(s)	Jeanne Olsen (m. 1921; her death 1943) Margie Little (m. 1960)
Children	1 (adopted)
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James Francis Durante (February 10, 1893 – January 29, 1980) was an American singer, pianist, comedian, and actor. His distinctive clipped gravelly speech, New York accent, comic language-butchery, jazz-influenced songs, and prominent nose helped make him one of America's most familiar and popular personalities of the 1920s through the 1970s. He often referred to his nose as the Schnozzola (from the Yiddish slang word "Schnoz" [big nose]), and the word became his nickname.

Durante was born on the Lower East Side of New York City. He was the youngest of four children born to Rosa (Lentino) and Bartolomeo Durante, both of whom were immigrants from Salerno, Italy. Bartolomeo was a barber. Young Jimmy served as an altar boy at Saint Malachy's Roman Catholic Church, known as the Actor's Chapel.

Durante dropped out of school in seventh grade to become a full-time ragtime pianist. He first played with his cousin, whose name was also Jimmy Durante. It was a family act, but he was too professional for his cousin. He continued working the city's piano bar circuit and earned the nickname "Ragtime Jimmy", before he joined one of the first recognizable jazz bands in New York, the Original New Orleans Jazz Band. Durante was the only member not from New Orleans. His routine of breaking into a song to deliver a joke, with band or orchestra chord punctuation after each line, became a Durante trademark. In 1920 the group was renamed Jimmy Durante's Jazz Band.

Jimmy Durante was a white bandleader who featured black musicians in his live band, such as Achille Baquet, who played and recorded in Durante's Original New Orleans Jazz Band (1918–1920).

By the mid-1920s, Durante had become a vaudeville star and radio personality in a trio called Clayton, Jackson and Durante. Lou Clayton and Eddie Jackson, Durante's closest friends, often reunited with Durante in subsequent years. Jackson and Durante appeared in the Cole Porter musical The New Yorkers, which opened on Broadway on December 8, 1930. Earlier that same year, the team appeared in the movie Roadhouse Nights, ostensibly based on Dashiell Hammett's novel Red Harvest.