Hollywood comedian: Danny DeVito turns 80 – gets going with trampoline jumping

Danny DeVito stays fit in an unusual way. The actor and comedian, who turns 80 on November 17th, helps with jumping exercises. He had a small trampoline in his dressing room on which he would get his lymph glands and blood going shortly before every performance, DeVito said on the “Kelly Clarkson Show” in January. But he admitted with a smile that he had to hold on to the wall or a coat hook.

Most recently he appeared on stage with his eldest daughter Lucy (41) on New York’s Broadway in the play “I Need That”. In the father-daughter comedy he plays a grumpy hoarder who is threatened with being thrown out of his apartment. In his long Hollywood career, the just 1.50 meter small joker made it big, especially through comedies such as “Gemini”, “Junior” and “Schnappt Shorty”.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is his friend

In “Twins” (1988) DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger (77) played two unequal twin brothers. In “Junior” (1994) they played scientists who are researching a fertility drug and who try it themselves and get one of the two pregnant.

The actors also made a funny couple on the Oscar stage last March when they presented an award. The stars joked that they weren’t invited together because they were twins, but because they both tried to kill Batman. For director Tim Burton, DeVito transformed into the penguin villain in “Batman Returns” (1992). In “Batman & Robin” Schwarzenegger became Mr. Freeze.

Fans of the duo can hope for another collaboration: “Arnold and I are good friends,” DeVito told CNN in March. They met long before “Twins”. They would now work on a joint film project again. He hopes that there will be “a nice script” for it soon.

But it’s not about a sequel to “Twins”. “We missed Twins 2 because he became governor – he should have done Twins 2 instead of becoming governor,” DeVito joked in an interview with men’s magazine GQ. Schwarzenegger was governor of California from 2003 to 2011.

A scary role for DeVito

DeVito has no shortage of roles. Most recently, Tim Burton brought him in front of the camera for a cameo appearance alongside Michael Keaton and Winona Ryder in “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice”. As a janitor in the afterlife with yellow slime running out of his mouth, DeVito fits perfectly into the horror chamber.

Since 2006 he has appeared in the darkly humorous comedy series “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” about the owners of an Irish bar in Philadelphia. Just in time for Christmas, he can be seen in the family comedy “A Sudden Case of Christmas” together with his daughter Lucy.

DeVito was born in 1944 in Asbury Park, a coastal town south of New York, in the US state of New Jersey. His mother was already 40 years old and they didn’t know whether he was “a baby or a tumor,” the Italian-American joked in an interview with the New York Times in 2018. His first job was as a helper at an amusement park on the beach. Even back then he was passionate about going to the cinema.

He came to film in a roundabout way – through his sister’s hairdressing salon. He first took makeup artist courses, then acting classes. In New York, the young DeVito shared a cheap apartment with his college friend Michael Douglas.

With Michael Douglas in a student shared apartment

Douglas brought him from New York to Los Angeles in 1975 for the psychological drama “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” which he produced. The role of patient Martini in a psychiatric institution was DeVito’s springboard for his Hollywood career. This was followed by the TV series “Taxi” as the grumpy boss of a taxi company and the adventure film “The Hunt for the Green Diamond” (1984) alongside Douglas and Kathleen Turner.

Barry Levinson cast him in “Tin Men” as an aluminum facade representative. Tim Burton made him the crime boss Penguin in Batman Returns. He made the cult film “Schnappt Shorty” with John Travolta. As a director, DeVito had success with the bizarre comedy “Throw Mommy Out of the Train” and the divorce satire “The War of the Roses.” As a producer of “Erin Brockovich” with his production company Jersey Films, he received an Oscar nomination for best picture.

DeVito is still close friends with Oscar winner Michael Douglas, who is the same age. When Douglas played an aging actor with frustration and prostate problems in the Netflix series “The Kominsky Method”, DeVito caused laughs in a guest role as a urologist.

Separation after decades of marriage

DeVito met the actress Rhea Perlman while he was still a student. After 30 years of marriage with three children and film appearances together, the couple announced their separation in 2012. They are not divorced, but they live separately. They are doing great as a family, the actor assured in an interview with Fox News in May. “We are grandparents and we see each other all the time.”

The agile joker is also tireless on the platform Under the hashtag “Trollfoot” he shows photos of his right bare foot, which he holds up to the camera: on the beach and under palm trees, in front of the Berlin Wall, at the Empire State Building, with a cat sniffing his toe or on the pool table.