Bradley Cooper has become a familiar face of the awards season, consistently starring in Oscar-nominated titles. This year his best bet is Maestro, the Leonard Bernstein biopic he’s not only the lead in, but also wrote, directed, and produced.
The film has generated some controversy, however, due to Cooper’s prosthetic nose which, in an effort to increase the actor-director’s likeness to the composer, has been dubbed “Jewface”.
Is Bradley Cooper Jewish like Leonard Bernstein?
First up, no, the Philadelphia-native 9-time Oscar-nominated actor Bradley Cooper is not Jewish. He’s of Italian and Irish descent and a Catholic. Cooper’s mother Gloria Campano has roots in the Southern Italian regions of Naples and Abruzzo, while his father Charles Cooper had Irish ancestry.
Speaking to Celtic Life International in 2014, the now 48-year-old filmmaker admitted to being “a product of his parents.” From his mom’s side came a love of eating and cooking, while his dad was highly influential in his outlook on life. “I was brought up a Roman Catholic in the correct way,” he said, adding that, growing up, he really looked up to his devout father, and wanted to be just like him.
“I was proud of his ancestry, as was he, and he was someone I really looked up to, in every aspect of who he was.”
Cooper helming a movie about the life of an acclaimed Jewish man has struck up a debate about Jewish representation on screen, and how often non-Jewish actors step into those roles (the famous composer and conductor was also known to have relationships with men, while Cooper is, for all we know, heterosexual). Just this year, in what will arguably be the prime contender at the Oscars, fellow Irish thespian Cillian Murphy all but became the Jewish father of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Bernstein’s three children Jamie, Alexander, and Nina Bernstein have come forward to say they are fine with all of Cooper’s choices in the film and that they’re certain their father would have been, too. “Strident complaints about this issue strike us above all as disingenuous attempts to bring a successful person down a notch — a practice we observed perpetrated all too often on our father,” the siblings’ stated.
Maestro is now in theaters on a limited release and will arrive on Netflix on Dec. 20.