Al Shean (Actor)

Reviews of Al Shean Movies

Looking for reviews of Al Shean movies? Cinafilm has a total of 196 reviews across 8 movies.

Movies starring Al Shean have generally received positive reviews and hold an average score of 61%.

Ziegfeld Girl - released in 1941 - is Al Shean's highest rated movie, with a score of 71% based on 30 reviews.

The lowest rated film from Al Shean is Live, Love and Learn - released in 1937 - with a score of 47% based on 3 reviews.

Actor Biography

Abraham Elieser Adolph Schönberg (12 May 1868 – 12 August 1949), known as Al Shean, was a comedian and vaudeville performer. Other sources give his birth name variously as Adolf Schönberg, Albert Schönberg, or Alfred Schönberg.[6] He is most remembered for being half of the vaudeville team Gallagher and Shean, and as the uncle of the Marx Brothers.

Shean was born in Dornum, Germany, on 12 May 1868, the son of Fanny and Levi or Louis Schoenberg. His father was a magician. His sister, Minnie, married Sam "Frenchie" Marx; their children would become the Marx Brothers.

After making a name for himself in vaudeville, Shean teamed up with Edward Gallagher, to create the act Gallagher and Shean in the 1920s. While the act was successful, the men apparently did not like each other much. After their act's final Ziegfeld Follies pairing, Shean went on to perform solo in eight Broadway shows, even playing the title character in Father Malachy's Miracle.

Shean had some solo film roles: as the piano player, known as "The Professor" in San Francisco (1936), as a priest in Hitler's Madman (1943), as grandfather in The Blue Bird (1940), and in some three dozen other films. He and Gallagher also made an early sound film at the Theodore Case studio in Auburn, New York, in 1925.

He died on 12 August 1949.

Al Shean has acted in films with Milton Kibbee, James Stewart, Ray Teal and Judy Garland.

Al Shean has worked with these film directors: Gene Kelly, Douglas Sirk, W.S. Van Dyke and Michael Gordon.