 During his schooldays, he wrote sketches for Budapest vaudeville shows under the pen name Szőke Szakáll, meaning "blond beard", in reference to his own beard, grown to make him look older, which he affected when, at the age of 18, he turned to acting.He became a United States citizen under the name of Jacob Gero ([a]ka Szőke Szakáll)

The actor became a star of the Hungarian stage and screen in the 1910s and 1920s.At the beginning of the 1920s, he moved to Vienna, where he appeared in Hermann Leopoldi's "Kabarett Leopoldi-Wiesenthal".