They say the Grim Reaper doesn’t have a sense of humor, but on March 27, 2002 the Scythemaster decided to prove everyone wrong. On that day, three towering figures were taken: comedian Milton Berle, actor/comedian Dudley Moore, and writer/director Billy Wilder.
Berle had an eight decade career that spanned Vaudeville, silent movies (as a child actor in appeared in “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farms” with Mary Pickford, “The Mark of Zorro” alongside Douglas Fairbanks, and “Tillie’s Punctured Romance,” starring Charlie Chaplin, and the first feature film produced by Keystone Studios), radio, and television, 
where “Texaco Star Theater,” a variety show he hosted and performed, often wearing dresses, premiered in 1948 and was an early TV hit, which gained him the nickname “Mr. Television.” The show was so popular Berle claimed that in Detroit “an investigation took place when the water levels took a drastic drop in the reservoirs on Tuesday nights between 9 and 9:05. It turned out that everyone waited until the end of the Texaco Star Theatre before going to the bathroom.” Berle was also one of the first national shows to feature a young singer with the odd name of Elvis Presley, who was a guest on the “Milton Berle Show” on April 3 and June 5, 1956, four months before his epochal appearance on Ed Sullivan. Berle’s show went off the air in 1960, but he still regularly showed up on TV, guesting on “The Lucy Show,” “Get Smart,” a turn as the villain “Louie The Lilac” on “Batman,” and movies, including “It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, World.” He was also one of founders of the Friar’s Club.
Although best known as an actor (“10,” “Arthur”), Dudley Moore was half of one of 
England’s funniest comedy duos, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, whose madcap, verbally dexterous routines—two working class chaps discussing politics, art, or other subjects— are a bridge between The Goon Show and Monty Python. As Derek and Clive, a pair of loutish bathroom attendants, they performed gleefully scabrous, ad libbed sketches. They wrote and starred in the 1967 satire “Bedazzled”,” a comic version of Faust, that also starred Raquel Welch (the 2000 remake with Brendan Frasier and Elizabeth Hurley did no one any favors). Moore was also an accomplished musician, composing the soundtracks to “Bedazzled” and “Six Weeks,” among others.
Billy Wilder was one of the greatest writer/directors of all time. As a screenwriter, he would be remembered for his work on 1939’s “Ninotchka,” a comedy starring Greta Garbo 
as a severe, buttoned-down Soviet spy who is seduced by Paris and Melvyn Douglas; its breezy romance—the movie’s posters included the famous tag-line, “Garbo Laughs!”—overshadowing its depiction of Stalinist Russia. But he went on to write and direct films that covered a wide range of styles: the downbeat drama of “The Lost Weekend,” the wartime POW camp drama “Stalag 17,” the corrosive newspaper drama “Ace In The Hole,” and the classic film noir “Double Indemnity.” But it was his comedies where he made his biggest impact: the Marilyn Monroe vehicles “Seven Year Itch” and “Some Like It Hot” (the latter often listed as the greatest American comedy ever made), ” the cynical buddy movie “The Fortune Cookie” (the first pairing of Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau), the controversial (due to its comic treatment of adultery) “The Apartment,” which marked the first time the Oscars for Best Picture, Director, and Screenplay were awarded to the same man), and his acid-penned valentine to Hollywood, “Sunset Boulevard.”
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