Last of the Munchkins
Wizard of Oz star Jerry Maren dies at 98 after 72-year acting career
JERRY Maren, the last surviving Munchkin from the classic film The Wizard of Oz, has died aged 98.
He played one of the three members of the Lollipop Guild who welcomed Dorothy to Munchkinland with a song and dance in the 1939 musical.
Jerry, who was 4ft 3in, had numerous other roles during his 72-year career, including as a gremlin in sitcom Bewitched in 1967 and as an ape in the 1968 movie Planet of the Apes.
He was aged 18 when he appeared in The Wizard of Oz alongside Judy Garland, who played Dorothy.
Jerry said in 2009: “She was an angel. She was a movie star and I’d figured she’d be a pain in the neck but she was glad to meet us and we were glad to meet her.”
He added: “Making the film was the greatest fun I ever had in my life.”
The actors were put up in a hotel in Culver City, California, for the duration of the filming, which became notorious for supposed orgies and drunken nights.
Jerry, just one of the many short actors who played Munchkins in the Hollywood movie, maintained that it was only a handful of little performers from Germany who constantly got up to trouble.
The American said: “They drank beer morning, noon and night.” He was a regular on 1970s US game show The Gong Show, throwing confetti as the winner was announced. He also appeared on TV in the original Star Trek series, sitcom Seinfeld and in costume for McDonald’s adverts as Mayor McCheese and the Hamburglar. Jerry died at a nursing home in San Diego, California, after battling dementia. His funeral was held in Hollywood Hills. Born Gerald Marenghi, in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1920, Jerry had nine brothers and sisters. He
was the only person in his family with dwarfism. The actor became a prominent member of the Little People of America, the organisation founded in 1957 to support those with dwarfism.
His final acting role was in 2010 and, though he had retired, he continued attending Judy Garland and Wizard of Oz festivals, celebrating the legacies of the late star and the film.
Jerry married US actress and fellow LPA member Elizabeth Barrington in 1975 and said he felt like “the luckiest guy in the world” to have met her.
They remained together until her death at the age of 69 in 2011.