The Wizard of Oz, Buried Under a Different Name in Brooklyn

Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn is the resting place of luminaries from Leonard Bernstein to Jean-Michel Basquiat. One headstone, however, is easy to miss. It reads simply "Wuppermann," yet beneath it lies Frank Morgan, the actor who played the title role in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz.

Born Francis Phillip Wuppermann in New York City in 1890, he grew up in a family that had built its fortune as the American distributor of Angostura bitters. That wealth sent him to Cornell University and, eventually, into the theater, following his older brother Ralph onto the stage in productions such as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes before making his screen debut in The Suspect in 1916.

Morgan went on to appear in dozens of films and earned an Academy Award nomination for The Affairs of Cellini, but the role that fixed him in popular memory was the bumbling, kindly humbug behind the curtain in Oz. Featured by Atlas Obscura on May 6, 2026, his understated grave is a small but telling reminder of how the public personas and private identities of Golden Age Hollywood stars often diverged.