Theatre promoter Delfont Mackintosh has been criticised for charging more than 500 ($980) for stalls seats at Brooks' show, the most expensive for a West End performance.
The fourth son of Jewish immigrants James and Kate Kaminsky, Brooks was born in Brooklyn in 1926, and brought up in Williamsburg during the Depression. James died of tuberculosis when Mel was 2 years old; he later traced his humour to that loss.
"I'm sure a lot of my comedy is based on anger," he said. "I learned to clothe it in comedy to spare myself problems."
By the age of 14, he was a "tummler" at the Jewish holiday resorts of the so-called "Borscht Belt" in the Catskill Mountains outside New York, entertaining guests around the swimming pool.
Brooks enlisted at 17 and served as a corporal in the US army in the final months of the war in Europe, where he fought in the Battle of the Bulge.
By 1950, he was writing for Sid Caesar's seminal sketch comedy series Your Show of Shows, in a TV writers' room that also contained playwright Neil Simon and Carl Reiner, with whom Brooks formed an enduring comedy duo. In 1961, their comedy LP sold one million copies; 37 years later, a 2000-Year-Old Man comeback album would earn Brooks his first Grammy.
That year, 1961, was also when Brooks divorced his first wife, Florence Baum, with whom he had three children, and met the woman who would become his second. Brooks and Anne Bancroft both appeared on the same episode of The Perry Como Show, and after watching the actress perform the song Married, I Could Always Get, Brooks supposedly introduced himself by saying, "I'm Mel Brooks and I'm going to marry you." He was a stocky 165cm, she a slender, stunning 173cm. Luckily for him, she owned his record, and was a fan. Their son, Max Brooks, is a bestselling author.
Brooks won his first handful of Emmys for Get Smart!, the sitcom about a hapless spy that he created with writer Buck Henry in 1965, and which ran for five years. Brooks had a script about two unscrupulous stage producers and their Nazi-themed musical, Springtime for Hitler. No studio was then willing to back The Producers.
His next film was a parody of the Western genre, as well as one of Hollywood's most striking anti-racist statements of the 1970s. Blazing Saddles saw a black man appointed sheriff in the Old West. Brooks co-wrote the screenplay with black comedian Richard Pryor. Blazing Saddles was the highest grossing US release of 1974. Brooks's next film, the horror parody Young Frankenstein, earned the year's fourth highest gross.
Brooks appears in most of his films, though not in such prominent roles as his near-contemporary Woody Allen. Brooks disguised his move upmarket by founding the company Brooksfilms to produce the likes of The Elephant Man and My Favourite Year (1982), starring Peter O'Toole.
With a new Star Wars film coming out this year, Brooks recently suggested he might make a sequel to his 1987 spoof, Spaceballs, with the working title Spaceballs 2: The Search for More Money. But the truth is that he has not directed a film since 1995's Dracula: Dead and Loving It.
In a recent interview with Men's Journal, Brooks said that when he made The Producers in 1968, "The memory of being in concentration camps was still vivid for Jews. It was literally in bad taste ... I said to my friends, I may be a little ahead of the curve at this point and have to wait for some of the world to catch up with me."
By the time the stage version opened on Broadway in 2001, the world had caught up. The show won a record 12 Tonys - and an Egot was born.
A life in brief
Born: June 28, 1926, Brooklyn, New York City
Family: Parents were Jewish immigrants James and Kate Kaminsky. Married to Florence Baum (1953-1962) and Anne Bancroft (1964-2005). He has four children.
Film career: Has won one Oscar, two Emmys, three Tonys, three Grammys and one Bafta.
- Independent
