- published: 08 Feb 2012
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Isaac Sidney "Sid" Caesar (born September 8, 1922) is an Emmy award winning American comic actor and writer known for the 1950s television series Your Show of Shows and Caesar's Hour, and to younger generations as Coach Calhoun in Grease and Grease 2.
Caesar was born in Yonkers, New York, the youngest son of Max Caesar and his wife Ida (née Raphael), Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire who ran a restaurant. Caesar would wait on tables and learned to mimic the accents, something he would use throughout his career. He first tried his double-talk with a group of Italians, his head barely reaching above the table. They enjoyed it so much that they sent him over to a group of Poles to repeat it in Polish, and so on with Russians, Hungarians, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Lithuanians and Bulgarians. Despite his apparent fluency in many languages, Caesar can actually speak only English and Yiddish. Sid's older brother David was his comic mentor and "one-man cheering section." They created their earliest family sketches from then current movies like Test Pilot and Wings.