Mel Brooks was honored with the 2,406th star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Leron Gubler, President and CEO of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, presided over the ceremony. Guests included Robert Osborne, Max Brooks, and Carl Reiner.

6712 Hollywood Boulevard on April 23, 2010.

BIOGRAPHY

Mel Brooks began his distinguished career during television's Golden Age as a writer for Sid Caesar on Your Show of Shows, the first of many comedy series for which he would write.

In the '60s, Brooks teamed up with Carl Reiner to write and perform The 2000 Year Old Man albums, which became immediate bestsellers and Grammy winners.

Brooks wrote and narrated The Critic, a short satire that received an Academy Award„¥ for Best Animated Short Subject in 1964. In 1965, he teamed up with Buck Henry to create the long-running television series Get Smart. In 1968, he wrote and directed his first feature film, The Producers, which earned him an Oscar® for Best Original Screenplay. It later became the basis for the hit Broadway musical and subsequent film version.

Brooks has created a remarkable string of hit comedies: The Twelve Chairs, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Silent Movie, High Anxiety, History of the World Part I, To Be or Not To Be, Spaceballs, Life Stinks, Robin Hood: Men in Tights and Dracula: Dead and Loving It. Like The Producers, Young Frankenstein also made a successful transition to the Broadway musical stage.

Brooks' visionary film company, Brooksfilms Limited, has produced some of America's most distinguished films, among them David Lynch's The Elephant Man and David Cronenberg's The Fly.

For three successive seasons, Brooks won Emmys for his role as Uncle Phil the series Mad About You. Last year, commemorating his lifelong contributions to American culture, Brooks was named among the recipients of the prestigious Kennedy Center Honors.

Matthew Broderick is an American film and stage actor who played the title character in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Nick Tatopoulos in Godzilla, Inspector Gadget in Inspector Gadget,

Jimmy Garrett in Project X and David Lightman in WarGames. He voiced the characters of the adult Simba in The Lion King and The Lion King II: Simba’s Pride, Tack the Cobbler in The Thief and the Cobbler, Adam Flaymen in Bee Movie, alongside Jerry Seinfeld, and Despereaux in The Tale of Despereaux. He played Leo Bloom in the film and Broadway productions of The Producers, and Colonel Robert Gould Shaw in the Civil War drama Glory.

Broderick was born in New York City, the son of Patricia, a playwright, actress, and painter; and James Joseph Broderick, an actor. Broderick’s mother was Jewish, and his father a Catholic of Irish descent. Broderick attended grade school at the City & Country School and attended high school at Walden School. After the death of his mother, her paintings were exhibited at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York.

Broderick’s first major acting role came in an HB Studio workshop production of playwright Horton Foote’s On Valentine’s Day, playing opposite his father, who was a friend of Foote’s. This was followed by a lead role in the off-Broadway production of Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy; then, a good review by New York Times theater critic Mel Gussow brought him to the attention of Broadway. Broderick commented on the effects of that review in a 2004 60 Minutes II interview:

Maureen O'Hara, born as Maureen FitzSimons, is an Irish film actress and singer. The famously red-headed O'Hara has been noted for playing fiercely passionate heroines with a highly sensible attitude. She often worked with director John Ford and longtime friend John Wayne. She published her autobiography, Tis Herself, in 2004.

O'Hara was born on the Lower Churchtown Rd in the Dublin suburb of Churchtown, Dublin 14, Ireland. She was the second oldest of six children by Charles Stewart Parnell FitzSimons and Marguerita Lilburn FitzSimons. Her father was a Dublin businessman and part owner of Shamrock Rovers Football Club, whom she has supported since childhood. Her mother, a former operatic contralto, was a successful womans' clothier. Her siblings were Peggy, the oldest, and younger Charles, Florrie, Margot and Jimmy. Peggy dedicated her life to a religious order, Sisters of Charity, and the younger children all went on to receive training at the Abbey Theater and the Ena Mary Burke School of Drama and Elocution in Dublin. O'Hara's dream at that time was to be an opera singer like her mother. O'Hara was raised as a Roman Catholic and educated at the Augustine St. John School for Girls near Thomas Street in Dublin's Liberties Area.

O'Hara's father was a very practical man and did not entirely support her theatrical aspirations. He insisted she learn a skill so that she would have something to fall back on to earn a living in case her experience in the performing arts was not successful. She enrolled in a business school and became a proficient bookkeeper and typist. Those skills proved helpful many years later when she was able to take and transcribe production notes dictated by John Ford for the screen adaptation of Maurice Walsh's short story The Quiet Man.

She did well in her Abbey training and was given an opportunity for a screen test in London. The studio adorned her in a "gold lamé dress with flapping sleeves like wings" and heavy make-up with an ornate hair style. Reportedly, her thoughts concerning the incident were, "If this is the movies, I want nothing to do with them!" The screen test was deemed to be far from satisfactory; however, actor Charles Laughton later saw the test and, despite the overdone makeup and costume, was intrigued, paying particular notice to her large and expressive eyes.

Maureen Paula O'Sullivan was an Irish actress who was considered Ireland's first film star.

O'Sullivan was born in Boyle, County Roscommon, Ireland, the daughter of Roman Catholic parents Mary Lovatt and Charles Joseph O'Sullivan, an officer in The Connaught Rangers who served in The Great War. She attended a convent school in Dublin, then the Convent of the Sacred Heart at Roehampton in London. One of her classmates there was Vivien Leigh. After attending finishing school in France, O'Sullivan returned to Dublin and began working with the poor.

O'Sullivan's film career began when she met motion picture director Frank Borzage, who was doing location filming on Song o' My Heart for 20th Century Fox. He suggested she take a screen test. She did and won a part in the movie, which starred Irish tenor John McCormack. She then traveled to the United States to complete the movie in Hollywood.

O'Sullivan appeared in six movies at Fox, then made three more at other movie studios. In 1932, she signed a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. After several roles there and at other movie studios, she was chosen by Irving Thalberg to appear as Jane Parker in Tarzan the Ape Man opposite co-star Johnny Weissmuller, with whom she had a brief affair during the early 1930s. Besides playing Jane, she was one of the more popular ingenues at MGM throughout the 1930s and appeared in a number of other productions with various stars.

Maurice Costello was a prominent vaudeville actor of the late 1890s and early 1900s, who later played a principal role in early American films, as both a leading man, supporting player and a director.

Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Irish immigrants Thomas Costello and Ellen Fitzgerald, Costello appeared in his first motion picture in 1905, in which he had the honour of appearing in the first serious film to feature the character of Sherlock Holmes in the movie Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, in which Costello played the title role. He continued to work for Vitagraph, being a member of the first motion picture stock company ever formed, playing opposite Florence Turner. Among some of his best known pictures are A Tale of Two Cities, The Man Who Couldn't Beat God and For the Honor of the Family. After an absence of some years he returned to the screen. He was married to actress Mae Costello. His daughters were the actresses Dolores Costello and Helene Costello, grandson John Drew Barrymore, and great granddaughter Drew Barrymore. He was one of the world's first leading men in early American cinema, but sadly, like a lot of other silent screen stars, he found the transition to "talkies" extremely difficult, and his leading man status was over. However, Costello was a trooper, and continued to appear in movies, often in small roles and bit parts, right up until his death in 1950.

Maurice Tourneur was an important international film director and screenwriter.

Born Maurice Thomas in the Belleville district of Paris, France, his father was a jeweler. As a young man, Maurice Thomas first trained as a graphic designer and a magazine illustrator but was soon drawn to the theater. In 1904, he married the actress, Fernande Petit. They had a son, Jacques who would follow his father into the film industry.

Using the stage name Maurice Tourneur, he began his show business career performing in secondary roles on stage and eventually toured England and South America as part of the theater company for the great star Gabrielle Réjane. Drawn to the new art of filmmaking, in 1911 he began working as an assistant director for the Éclair company. A quick learner and an innovator, within a short time he was directing films on his own using major French stars of the day such as Polaire.

In 1914, with the expansion of the giant French film companies into the United States market, Tourneur moved to New York City to direct silent films for Éclair’s American branch studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey before moving to William A. Brady’s World Film Corporation, where he directed important early American feature-length films such as The Wishing Ring, Alias Jimmy Valentine, The Cub and Trilby, the last starring Clara Kimball Young and noted stage actor Wilton Lackaye as Svengali. Before long, Maurice Tourneur was a major and respected force in American film and a founding member of the East Coast chapter of the Motion Picture Directors Association. As the feature film evolved in the mid 1910s, he and his team coupled exceptional technological skill with unique pictorial and architectural sensibilities in their productions, giving their films a visual distinctiveness that met with critical acclaim.