Early Life
Bolger was born into an Irish Catholic family in Dorchester, a section of Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Anne (née Wallace) and James Edward Bolger. He was inspired by the vaudeville shows he attended when he was young to become an entertainer himself. He began his career in a vaudeville tab show, creating the act "Sanford & Bolger" with his dance partner. In 1926, he danced at New York City's legendary Palace Theatre, the top vaudeville theatre in the country. His limber body and ability to ad lib movement won him many starring roles on Broadway in the 1930s. Eventually, his career would also encompass film, television and nightclub work.
Read more about this topic: Ray Bolger
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“All of Western tradition, from the late bloom of the British Empire right through the early doom of Vietnam, dictates that you do something spectacular and irreversible whenever you find yourself in or whenever you impose yourself upon a wholly unfamiliar situation belonging to somebody else. Frequently its your soul or your honor or your manhood, or democracy itself, at stake.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)
“But the divinest poem, or the life of a great man, is the severest satire.... The greater the genius, the keener the edge of the satire.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)