1906–1972 · American pianist, composer, actor and radio wit
Oscar Levant was a serious concert pianist — the foremost interpreter of his friend George Gershwin — who became far more famous for talking. On radio panel shows and in films he perfected a character built from neurosis, insomnia and unbearable candour, and then wrote three memoirs in the same voice, of which The Memoirs of an Amnesiac (1965) is the best known. His jokes were mordant enough that they have a habit of being reassigned to comedians who could not have been in the room: the Doris Day line is about a film Levant himself appeared in.