Irving Lahrheim (August 13, 1895 – December 4, 1967), known professionally as Bert Lahr, was an American stage and screen actor and comedian.

He was best known for his role as the Cowardly Lion, as well as his counterpart Kansas farmworker "Zeke", in the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer adaptation of The Wizard of Oz (1939).

Lahr was born as Irving Lahrheim on August 13, 1895, at First Avenue and 81st Street,[1] in the Yorkville section of Upper East Side of Manhattan, New York City.

In 1939, he co-starred as Louis Blore alongside Ethel Merman in the Broadway production of DuBarry Was a Lady, receiving acclaim.

In 1962 he returned to Broadway, in S. J. Perelman's The Beauty Part,[1] and won the 1965 Tony for Best Actor in a musical for Foxy, an adaption of Volpone.

[5] In June 2013, Lahr's original reading script for The Wizard of Oz, bequeathed to his great-grandson, was appraised with an insurance value of $150,000 on PBS's Antiques Roadshow in an episode filmed in Detroit, Michigan.

He got a script of Waiting for Godot, and was greatly impressed but unsure of how the revolutionary play would be received in the United States.

He co-starred in the US premiere of Waiting for Godot in 1956 at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami, Florida, playing Estragon[2] to Tom Ewell's Vladimir.

In his book Notes on a Cowardly Lion, Lahr's son John states that the problems were caused partly by the choices of the director, including the decision to limit Bert's movement on stage; filling the stage with platforms; and a misguided description of the play as a light comedy, along with other difficulties.

This time, it was with a new director, Herbert Berghof, who had met with Samuel Beckett, the playwright, in Europe and discussed the play.

[9] He performed in commercials, including a memorable series for Lay's potato chips during its long running "Betcha can't eat just one" campaign with Lahr appearing in different costumes.

He played Moonface Martin in a television version of Anything Goes, with Ethel Merman reprising her role as Reno Sweeney and Frank Sinatra appearing as Billy Crocker.

In 1963, he appeared as Go-Go Garrity in the episode "Is Mr. Martian Coming Back" on NBC's medical drama The Eleventh Hour.

At the American Shakespeare Festival he played Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream (1960), for which he received the Best Shakespearean Actor of the Year Award.

He also describes his father as living in "habitual solitude" and plagued by "morbid worry", "moroseness" and "the thick fog of some ontological anxiety, which seemed to have settled permanently around [him] and was palpable, impenetrable".

However, his son John explained that although two weeks earlier, Bert "had returned home at 2 a.m., chilled and feverish, from the damp studio where The Night They Raided Minsky's was being filmed," and although "newspapers reported the cause of death as pneumonia...he succumbed to cancer, a disease he feared but never knew he had."

All in the Family creator/producer Norman Lear told The New York Times that "through judicious editing, we will be able to shoot the rest of the film so that his wonderful performance will remain intact."