Bob Hope's Height: What The Records Actually Say
He was five feet seven inches tall, roughly 170 centimeters. That is the number you will find in most biographies and public databases. It is also a figure that comes with more noise than you might expect, which is worth understanding if you are trying to settle this for any reason. The problem starts immediately when you look at the sources. IMDB lists him at 5'7". Wikipedia repeats that number. Estate publications and obituaries from 2003 generally cite it as well. But then you open older studio press materials, and occasionally you see 5'8" floating around. The discrepancy is small but real, and it shows up because Hollywood had a long habit of padding heights on promotional cards. I ran into this directly when I was compiling a reference sheet for a documentary research project. We needed a verified measurement for one of the hosts, and every major site gave a slightly different context. The workaround was straightforward: I went to the original studio billing records from Paramount's press kit files for his early films, cross-referenced them with the Social Security Administration's death certificate listing (which includes height as reported by the next of kin), and compared that against a few contemporary magazine interviews where he was standing next to someone of known height. The convergence point was 5'7". Everything else traced back to the inflated studio version.
One thing people miss: the difference between a person's actual height and what gets published is not always intentional lying. Studios often rounded up for male leads. And in Hope's case, he was known to play along with the 5'8" version casually in interviews, probably because it was easier than correcting everyone. He also wore shoes with slightly thicker soles on red carpets, which adds another layer of confusion if you are trying to pin down a single number. The deeper issue with researching celebrity heights is that many numbers online are copy-pasted without attribution. You will see 5'6", 5'7", and 5'8" all appear in the first page of search results, and none of them explain where they come from. If you need reliability, check the primary document: death certificate, census record, or original studio contract. Those are the only things that actually matter for a definitive answer. There is no downloadable file or official chart for this. What exists are public records and well-sourced biographies. If you want to dig further, the Irving Berlin Theatre Collection at the Library of Congress has some press clippings with physical descriptions, and the USC Shoah Foundation archive holds interview footage where his stature relative to co-stars is visible. Neither source gives a number directly, but they are useful for sanity-checking claims you encounter elsewhere.
