Jerry Colonna (entertainer)

His son, Robert Colonna, has been involved in theater for nearly 60 years, since first appearing on stage with his father. He was a member of the famed Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, Rhode Island. He is the founder and director of the Rhode Island Shakespeare Theater. He has also directed many productions at Rhode Island College, and in 2007, published a biography of his father's life, Greetings, Gate!: The Story of Professor Jerry Colonna.

In 1999, Jeff MacKay portrayed Colonna in the JAG episode "Ghosts of Christmas Past."

Colonna was also mentioned in Jack Kerouac's 1957 novel On the Road.

Colonna joined ASCAP in 1956; his songwriting credits include "At Dusk", "I Came to Say Goodbye", "Sleighbells in the Sky" and "Take Your Time." In the 1950s he released two LPs, Music? for Screaming!!! (Decca DL 5540) and He Sings and Swings (Mercury-Wing MGW 12153).

He was host of the "Revenge with Music" episode on The Colgate Comedy Hour in 1954. His TV work also included voicing Moon Mad Tiger on Time for Beany, serving as the second and last ringmaster/host/performer on Super Circus (1955–56), and appearing in a version of Babes in Toyland on Shirley Temple's Storybook in 1960. He also made guest appearances in the 1957 Climax! episode "The Giant Killer"; the 1959 The Gale Storm Show episode "Come Back, Little Beatnik"; the 1965 McHale's Navy episode "Hello, McHale? Colonna!"; and the 1966 The Monkees episode "Don't Look a Gift Horse in the Mouth".

He provided the voice of the March Hare in the Walt Disney animated film version of Alice in Wonderland (1951) (another radio star, Ed Wynn, voiced the hare's companion, the Mad Hatter) and also lent his zany narration style to several Disney shorts, including Casey at the Bat from Make Mine Music (1946) and The Brave Engineer (1950).

Colonna left the Hope show as a regular in 1950, but he continued appearing with Hope on holiday television specials and live shows. He hosted his own television comedy series, The Jerry Colonna Show, which lasted a single season.

Colonna also appeared in one of the oldest surviving kinescope recordings of a live television broadcast, from 1947.

In the 1944 comedy Trocadero, Johnny Downs, in a vaudeville duo routine, dons a fake Colonna-style moustache and mimics Colonna's singing voice.

In an opera parody, Colonna hollered an aria "in a deadpan screech that became his trademark" on Bob Hope's show, Nachman noted. Colonna was one of three memorable 1940s Kraft Music Hall discoveries. The others were pianist-comedian Victor Borge and Trotter's drummer, music "depreciationist" Spike Jones.

Colonna was part of several of Hope's early USO tours during the 1940s. Jack Benny's singing sidekick Dennis Day, a talented impressionist as well as a singer, did an effective imitation of Colonna's manic style and expressions.

Colonna featured in three of the popular Hope-Crosby Road films: Road to Singapore (1940) as Achilles Bombassa, Road to Rio (1947) as a Cavalry captain and The Road to Hong Kong (1962) in a cameo role. He can also be seen in the Fred Allen vehicle, It's in the Bag! (1945), as psychiatrist Dr. Greenglass, and he made a brief appearance with Hope in the "Wife, Husband and Wolf" sketch in Star Spangled Rhythm. In 1956 he performed the featured song "My Lucky Charm" in the film Meet Me in Las Vegas, starring Dan Dailey and Cyd Charisse.

He was of Italian heritage. Colonna's parents were Elisabetta Magro and Giuseppe Colonna from Muro Lucano (Potenza). He married Florence Purcell, (Porciello) whom he reportedly met on a blind date in 1930; the couple adopted a son, Robert, in 1941. The marriage lasted 56 years. After his guest shot on The Monkees, Colonna suffered a stroke. Its paralytic effect forced his retirement from show business (save for a couple of brief cameo appearances in late 1960s/early 1970s Bob Hope specials), and a 1979 heart attack forced him to spend the last seven years of his life in the Motion Picture and Television Hospital. Florence stayed by his side to the end, when he died of kidney failure in 1986. She died eight years later at the same hospital.

Colonna started his career as a trombonist in orchestras and dance bands in and around his native Boston; he can be heard with Joe Herlihy's orchestra on discs recorded for Edison Records in the late 1920s. During the 1930s, Colonna played with the CBS house orchestra, the Columbia Symphony Orchestra, and developed a reputation for prankishness. During his tenure at CBS he occasionally worked under bandleader Raymond Scott, and made several recordings with Scott's famous Quintette, which typically involved Colonna mouthing nonsense syllables over Scott's band. His off-stage antics were so calamitous that CBS nearly fired him on more than one occasion. Fred Allen, then on CBS, gave Colonna periodic guest slots, and a decade later he joined the John Scott Trotter band on Bing Crosby's Kraft Music Hall.

Gerardo Luigi Colonna (September 17, 1904 – November 21, 1986), better known as Jerry Colonna, was an American musician, actor, comedian, singer, songwriter and trombonist who played the zaniest of Bob Hope's sidekicks in Hope's popular radio shows and films of the 1940s and 1950s. He also voiced the March Hare in Disney's 1951 animated film Alice in Wonderland.