Imogene Coca - Early Life

Early Life

Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Coca's parents were veterans of the entertainment industry; her father, José Fernandez de Coca, was a well-known violinist and vaudeville orchestra conductor, and her mother, Sadie Brady, was a dancer and magician's assistant.

Coca took lessons in piano, dance, and voice as a child and while still a teenager moved from Philadelphia to New York City to become a dancer. She got her first job in the chorus of the Broadway musical When You Smile, and became a headliner in Manhattan nightclubs with music arranged by her first husband, Robert Burton. She gained prominence when she began to combine music with comedy; her first critical success was in New Faces of 1934. A well-received part of her act was a comic striptease, during which Coca made sultry faces and gestures but would manage to remove only one glove. She committed this routine to film in the Educational Pictures comedy short The Bashful Ballerina (1937), and co-starred opposite another newcomer to films, Danny Kaye, in Educational's 1937 short Dime a Dance. Both of these comedies were filmed in New York.