Singer/Songwriter

Max also developed a talent for guitar-playing, influenced strongly by visiting American singer Nick Lucas, `The Crooning Troubadour’, and began to compose his own songs. Over 100 were eventually registered with the Performing Right Society, many under Max’s pen-name `Michael Hodges’. Such well-known artistes as Turner Layton, Peter Dawson and Joe Loss recorded
them as well as Max himself.


Musical Comedy and Revue Artist

After appearing with Evelyn Laye in the musical comedy Merely Molly at the Adelphi in 1926, Max was chosen by the great impresario CB Cochran to star alongside Jessie Matthews, Douglas Byng and an all-star cast, with Leslie ‘Hutch’ Hutchinson (to become a lifelong friend) as musical director, in One Dam Thing After Another at the London Pavilion the following year. He appeared in Bow
Bells at the London Hippodrome with Binnie Hale in 1932 and was chosen to open on Broadway the same year in the famous Earl Carroll Vanities alongside Will Fyffe and the young Milton Berle.

 
Subsequent appearances included a major production of Mother Goose with Markova and Dolin in 1936 at
the Hippodrome and a co-starring role in George Black’s Black and Blue in 1939 at the same venue with Frances Day and Vic Oliver, followed by Present Arms with Billy Bennett in 1940 at the Prince of Wales. The next landmark in Max's career was when he played what the Sunday Express called 'an excruciatingly comic sailor', alongside Richard Hearne, Jack Stanford and Claude Hulbert, in Cole Porter's musical Panama Hattie, starring Bebe Daniels, at the Picadilly Theatre in 1943. The peak of Max’s achievement in musical comedy was his starring role as Hines in The Pajama Game at the London Coliseum in 1955.