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Kahn was born in Boston, Massachusetts , as Madeline Gail Wolfson to a Jewish family. Her mother, Paula, was 17 when Kahn was born. Although Kahn's parents were high-school sweethearts, they divorced when she was 2. After the divorce was finalized, Kahn and her mother moved to New York City . A few years later, her mother remarried and this union gave Kahn two half-siblings (Jeffrey and Robyn). In 1948 , Kahn was sent to a progressive boarding school in Pennsylvania and stayed there until 1952 . During that time, her mother pursued her ambition as an actress. Ironically, Kahn soon began acting herself and performed in a number of school productions. In 1960, she graduated from the Martin Van Buren High School in Queens, NY where she earned a drama scholarship to Hofstra University . At Hofstra, she studied music, drama, and speech therapy and also performed in several campus productions. After changing her major a number of times, Kahn graduated in 1964 with a degree in speech therapy.
Kahn began auditioning for professional acting roles shortly after her graduation from Hofstra; on the side, she briefly taught public school in Levittown, NY . Just before adopting the professional name of Madeline Kahn (Kahn was her stepfather's last name), she made her stage debut as a chorus girl in a revival of Kiss Me, Kate which led her to join the Actors' Equity . In 1968 , she earned her first break on Broadway with New Faces of 1968 and then performed her first lead role in the musical Candide . She debuted in the movies that same year with a role in De Düva: The Dove . Her most famous roles followed in the 1970s : she appeared in What's Up, Doc? ( 1972 ), Paper Moon ( 1973 ), Young Frankenstein ( 1974 ), Blazing Saddles ( 1974 ), and High Anxiety ( 1977 ). The final three films were all directed by Mel Brooks , who many Hollywood observers claimed was able to bring out the best of Kahn's comic talents. For her work in Paper Moon and Blazing Saddles , the young comedienne received nominations for Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress .
Kahn's roles were primarily comedic rather than dramatic. After her success in Brooks's films, she played in a number of less successful films in the 1980s. At the end of her career, she returned to the stage and won a Tony Award for her role in The Sisters Rosensweig , a play by Wendy Wasserstein . In the final years of her life, she played a major role on the sitcom Cosby and voiced Gypsy the moth in A Bug's Life , before succumbing to ovarian cancer on December 3 , 1999 . She was only 57 years old.
She was survived by her husband (John Hansbury), mother (Paula Kahn), brother (Jeffrey Kahn), and niece (Eliza Kahn).
In the early 1990s , Kahn recorded a voice for the animated movie The Magic 7 ; along with John Candy , she will be one of two deceased actors with voices in that movie.
Also in 1981 she was back with Brooks in "Mel Brooks' History of the World: Part 1"