Joel Grey

Joel Grey. I say those words, and you almost certainly picture Cabaret. And there’s nothing wrong with that. He won both an Oscar and a Tony for his role. It’s iconic. It’s Joel Grey as the Master of Ceremonies. Other people have done the role, but Joel Grey will always be the standard against which they are measured. Cabaret has a plot, but it’s the Master of Ceremonies who holds the show together and reminds us of the background, and without Joel Grey, I’m not sure the show would be as well known as it is. Which is a heck of a legacy all by itself.

Joel Grey’s IMDb bio is mostly about his father, which is fine I guess but must be weird for him. His father was himself a performer. He did a show called the Borscht Capades, and it’s through that show that young Joel Katz got his start. His father had had radio stations refuse to play his music because it was Jewish, and that’s why Joel went from Katz to Grey. He did Broadway starting fairly young, and from there he went to TV and the movies.

I am once again delighted to remember that he did Calypso Heat Wave, a movie I will definitely watch one of these days because of its bonkers cast if nothing else. He’s fifth-billed in it. He played Laurie, an incredibly WASPy character, in a made-for-TV version of Little Women featuring Margaret O’Brien as Beth and Florence Henderson as Meg. He was Billy the Kid on an episode of Maverick. He was on an episode of Kraft Television Theatre, and while I cannot find the character he played, the episode was “Forty Weeks of Uncle Tom.”

Frankly, his post-Cabaret career is equally wild. I suspect there are very few people who have been on Touched By an Angel, Oz, and Phineas and Ferb. He played an amnesia victim on Crossing Jordan, a show we’ll have more to say about in December. He was apparently decently important on his three episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and he did three episodes of Further Tales of the City. He’s played Joseph Goebbels and Jeff Sessions. The fact that he was in the oft-forgotten movie version of The Fantasticks can slip under the radar because, let’s be real, that’s the sort of thing you actually expect to see Joel Grey in, given he’s also been appearing on the stage this whole time.

I am always curious about people who come out late in life. I haven’t read his book, so I don’t know his own specific story on the subject. But frankly, Gen-X people like myself mostly know him as “Jennifer Grey’s father.” He was married to her mother for twenty-four years, and they also have a son named James Katz who’s a chef. Was it a lavender marriage? Was he unaware of his sexuality himself? Was he trying to be straight? This is something that is, as usual, officially none of my business, but it is the sort of story I hope we’ll hear less of as generations go by, because he identifies as gay, not bi. I hope he’s happy now, no matter what has led up to this moment.