Fun_People Archive
24 Dec
RIP Victor Borge, clown prince of Denmark

Content-Type: text/plain
Mime-Version: 1.0 (NeXT Mail 3.3 v118.2)
From: Peter Langston <psl>
Date: Sun, 24 Dec 100 13:41:47 -0800
To: Fun_People
Precedence: bulk
Subject: RIP Victor Borge, clown prince of Denmark

X-Lib-of-Cong-ISSN: 1098-7649  -=[ Fun_People ]=-
X-http://www.langston.com/psl-bin/Fun_People.cgi
Forwarded-by: Joe Weihe <joeweihe@home.com>
http://www.cnn.com/
From: staff and wire reports

GREENWICH, Connecticut -- Victor Borge, the daffy pianist whose whimsical
approach to the classics earned him the moniker the "clown prince" of
Denmark, died Saturday.  He was 91.

For decades, Borge delighted audiences by deflating the pomposity of
classical music.  He fell off his bench, played music upside down and in
weird ways, and repeatedly milked laughs from such classic routines as
"phonetic punctuation" in which he used goofy sounds to indicate commas,
periods and question marks in his monologue.

"He was really fine when we came home," his daughter Frederikke Borge told
CNN.  He died "peacefully, no pain," she said.  "He died of terminal life.
He was 91 years old and his heart stopped."

"I think he meant the world to me, as every father does to every daughter,
but he meant a lot to a lot of other people, which made me proud to be his
daughter, and he was a very decent and generous man, which also made me
proud.  I think he brought laughter to the world, and I think he was a very
gifted musician, and I'll miss him terribly."

Borge, who had not been ill, had been planning to tour Australia next week.
"It was just his time to go," his daughter said.  "He's been missing my
mother terribly."  Borge's wife, Sanna Sarabel Borge, died September 19.
His first marriage ended in divorce.

He leaves behind five children, nine grandchildren and one great-
granddaughter.

Borge kept up a busy career into his 80s, touring and issuing videos,
including his most popular, "The Best of Victor Borge," which sold some 3
million copies.

Borge performed 100 or more nights a year, sometimes as pianist and
sometimes as conductor, usually as a clown but sometimes in dead earnest.
In his later years, he directed Mozart's "Magic Flute" in Cleveland and
prepared a concert version of "Carmen."

"I could probably play every night.  I have enough offers.  And sometimes
it is very tempting to do that," he said in a 1992 interview.  "If I decide
to stay home, it's a very expensive sleep."

In 1999, Borge was one of five performers selected for the Kennedy Center
Honors.

"He's never said a four-letter word, never had any dirt," Borge's manager,
Bernard Gurtman, said.  "He's a total professional that you meet once in
your life.  He was a trailblazer like Milton Berle, he did it once, and
did it live."

A native of Denmark, Borge learned English by spending day after day in
movie theaters, and memorized some of his routines phonetically.  Rudy
Vallee gave him a shot at radio.  Then he became a regular on Bing Crosby's
"Kraft Music Hall."

In Hollywood, Borge appeared in "Higher and Higher" with Frank Sinatra in
1943 and "Meet the People" in 1944.  He became a U.S. citizen in 1948.

In 1953, Borge's one-man show, "Comedy in Music," began a run of 849
performances, the Broadway record for a solo show.  He revived it in 1977
in a limited run of one month that was extended to two.

Borge married his second wife in 1953.  They had three children, Sann,
Victor and Frederikke.  He had two children, Ronald and Janet, by his first
wife.

His routines came from reality.  Borge once saw a pianist slide right off
his bench while playing a concerto, and he recreated that disaster hundreds
of times.

"I do a thing with a page turner.  Everybody who has ever tried to have a
page turner knows that it is terribly dangerous, and the better musician
you are the more you have been exposed to mistakes," Borge said.  "So, when
I do that routine the orchestra members just fall off their seats.  They
all know.  "Many in the audience also know it, but the ones who do not know
the reality will laugh at the clowning of it."

He was born in Copenhagen on January 3, 1909, the youngest of five boys.
His father was a violinist for 33 years in the Royal Symphony, and expected
his son to follow suit.  Instead, the boy took a liking to his mother
Frederika's instrument, the piano.

He made his concert debut at 13, and kept that up until 1934.  His friends,
though, knew him as a parlor comedian, and in 1931 a new career opened when
he wrote the music for an amateur show, and then substituted for the star.

Borge made Adolf Hitler a butt of his jokes, and he was fortunate to be in
Sweden when the Nazis invaded Denmark in 1940.  Soon after, he and his
American wife, Elsie, left for the United States, arriving with nothing
but their Scottish terrier.

In an Associated Press interview when he was 80, Borge said "luck, good
fortune and stamina" kept him performing.

"I never have to get 'up' for a performance," he said.  "The moment I walk
on the stage, no matter what my mood, if I have any regrets or feel sick
or in pain, all that disappears.  That is when the climax of my day occurs."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

© 2000 Peter Langston