Danny Kaye

Kaye and Sylvia Fine grew up in Brooklyn, living a few blocks apart, but they did not meet until they were working on an off-Broadway show in 1939.[84] Sylvia was an audition pianist.

Sylvia discovered that Danny had worked for her father Samuel Fine, a dentist Kaye, working in Florida, proposed on the telephone; the couple were married in Fort Lauderdale[86] on January 3, 1940. The couple were married for life except for a separation in 1947 and 1948, when Kaye was involved with Eve Arden.[89]

The couple's only child, daughter Dena, was born on December 17, 1946. When she was very young, Dena did not like seeing her father perform because she did not understand that people were supposed to laugh at what he did. Kaye said in a 1954 interview, "Whatever she wants to be she will be without interference from her mother nor from me." Dena grew up to become a journalist.

Donald Spoto, the author of Laurence Olivier (Harper Collins), made an unsubstantiated claim that Kaye had a 10-year secret affair with Laurence Olivier. Despite media rumor since that book's publication, no evidence has been published. The English journalist Terry Coleman, who spent four years studying Olivier's archive of letters and memorabilia, could not find evidence of such an affair between Kaye and Olivier. Coleman observed, "I did check it and talked to a number of people. In this mountain of material in the archives I could not find a hint of an affair with Danny Kaye."

On 18 January 2013, during a 24-hour salute to Kaye on Turner Classic Movies in celebration of what TCM thought was his 100th birthday, Kaye's daughter, Dena, revealed to TCM host Ben Mankiewicz that Kaye's stated birth year of 1913 was incorrect, and that he was actually born in 1911.