EGOT winner Mel Brooks to receive LAFCA Career Achievement Award

The Los Angeles Film Critics Association has chosen legendary actor/writer/director/producer Mel Brooks as the recipient of this year’s Career Achievement Award.

LAFCA’s other top awards will be decided by the membership on Sunday, December 12, 2021 and those winners will be honored along with Brooks early next year.

“Mel Brooks is a national treasure and a comedy filmmaking legend,” said LAFCA President Claudia Puig. “Most of our members could probably quote whole swaths of his screenplays from Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles, The Producers and so many others. I know I could. He not only has made us laugh uproariously, he has broken comic barriers and paved the way for and influenced generations of filmmakers after him. We are thrilled to be honoring the incomparable Mel Brooks.”

With a career spanning over seven decades, actor, producer, director and screenwriter, Mel Brooks began as a comic and a writer on Sid Caesar’s variety show Your Show of Shows. Later, with Carl Reiner, he created the comic character The 2000 Year Old Man and wrote the hit television comedy series Get Smart with Buck Henry.

Widely considered to be among the best film comedies ever made, Brooks’ films include: The Producers (1967), The Twelve Chairs (1970), Blazing Saddles (1974), Young Frankenstein (1974), Silent Movie (1976), High Anxiety (1977), History of the World, Part I (1981), Spaceballs (1987), and Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993). 

In 2001, having previously won an Emmy, a Grammy and an Oscar, he joined a small list of EGOT winners with his Tony Award wins for The Producers. He received a Kennedy Center Honor in 2009 and a Hollywood Walk of Fame star in 2010.

Photo: Shutterstock

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Erik Anderson

Erik Anderson is the founder/owner and Editor-in-Chief of AwardsWatch and has always loved all things Oscar, having watched the Academy Awards since he was in single digits; making lists, rankings and predictions throughout the show. This led him down the path to obsessing about awards. Much later, he found himself in film school and the film forums of GoldDerby, and then migrated over to the former Oscarwatch (now AwardsDaily), before breaking off to create AwardsWatch in 2013.

He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Critics Choice Association (CCA), San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle (SFBAFCC) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.

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