Laurel, Stan (16 June 1890-23 Feb. 1965), and Oliver Hardy (18 Jan. 1892-7 Aug. 1957), comic actors, were born, respectively, in Ulverston, Lancashire, England, and Harlem, Georgia. Stan, born Arthur Stanley Jefferson, was the son of Arthur J. Jefferson, an actor-manager, and Madge Metcalfe, an actress in Jefferson's troupe. Oliver, born Norvell Hardy, was the son of Oliver Hardy, a lawyer, and Emily Norvell. Joining together as Laurel and Hardy in 1927, the duo became the first important comedy team in American film history.
Known as Jefferson until at least 1917, Laurel completed his sporadic and itinerant primary and secondary school education in Glasgow, Scotland, where in 1905 he began working in his father's Metropole Theatre box office. Laurel, who had come to idolize such singing and dancing comedians as Dan Leno, a master of long, wandering anecdotes, appeared in 1906 as "Stan Jefferson--He of the Funny Ways" at Pickard's Museum Music Hall in Glasgow. In 1907 he toured with Levy and Cardwell's Juvenile Pantomimes, a satirical troupe. By 1908 he had performed in small music halls and played his father's variety sketch "Home from the Honeymoon" (later adapted into the Laurel and Hardy film Another Fine Mess). In 1909 Laurel appeared in the musical comedy Gentleman Jockey and the melodrama Alone in the World.
In 1910 Laurel joined Fred Karno's troupe in "Mumming Birds," a portrayal of a variety show beset by such problems as a raucous drunk in the audience. Laurel, often the Comic Singer, understudied the Drunk, played by Charlie Chaplin. Laurel left Karno's touring troupe in the United States in 1911, trying American vaudeville before returning to Britain with another Karno dropout to form the Barto Brothers and write their "The Rum 'Uns from Rome," fifteen minutes of slapstick characterized by lightning timing and explosive effects. After the act broke up, Laurel joined the unsuccessful Eight Comics and then returned to the Karno Troupe.
When Chaplin decided to remain in the States during the Karno Troupe's visit in 1913, so did Laurel, who formed the Three Comiques with Edgar Hurley and Hurley's wife, Wren; the trio performed Laurel's knockabout "The Nutty Burglars," wherein two clumsy burglars pass around a lighted bomb. The Comiques evolved into the Keystone Trio; Laurel, into an exceptional Chaplin impersonator. In 1916 came the Stan Jefferson Trio and "The Crazy Cracksman," a sketch involving flypaper and pratfalls. In 1917 Laurel formed an act with Mae Charlotte Dahlberg, an Australian singer-dancer. They became Stan and Mae Laurel. (Dahlberg later insisted that her partner's superstition about the thirteen letters in "Stan Jefferson" led her to extract the name "Laurel" from a Roman history book.) That same year Laurel had made his first short film, Nuts in May, another slapstick venture. In another, A Lucky Dog (1917), his character is held up by a bandit played by Oliver Hardy. Laurel made eleven films in 1918, most with Mae and four as "Hickory Hiram" for Carl Laemmle's Universal Studios.
In 1919 film producer Hal Roach, whose studio had just moved to Culver City, California, saw the Laurels in vaudeville. Beginning in 1921 Laurel made a series of one-reel (ten-minute) comedies for Roach, followed by several parodies of popular films, including Mud and Sand, in which Laurel portrayed Rhubarb Vaselino. By 1925 Laurel had made more than forty films but, according to director George Stevens, was still dancing frantically and "laughing and smiling too much." His new producer, Joe Rock, blaming Mae for Laurel's lack of progress, paid her $1,000 to return to Australia, and that same year Laurel married Vitagraph ingenue Lois Neilsor; they had one child before divorcing in 1935. In 1926 Roach persuaded Laurel to join--largely as writer and gag-man--his new Comedy All-Stars, a repertory group that included James Finlayson, Max Davidson, Clyde Cook, Eugene Palette, Edgar Kennedy, Noah Young, Mae Busch, Anita Garvin, and Oliver Hardy.
When Norvell Hardy was eight, his father died and the family moved to Madison, Georgia. His name was legally changed to Oliver Norvell Hardy, and he took his boy soprano voice briefly on the road with Coburn's Minstrels. By the age of fourteen Hardy weighed 250 pounds. His intermittent education included terms at Georgia Military College and the Atlanta Conservatory of Music. In 1910 the family moved to Milledgeville, Georgia, where Hardy worked in a film theater.
Hardy began appearing as the "heavy" in Vim Comedies in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1913, the year of his first marriage, to Madelyn Caloshin. They divorced in 1920 without having any children. He acquired the habit of wearing a derby hat. In 1915 he teamed with Bobby Ray in The Paperhanger's Helper, a slapstick comedy in which Hardy played the bumbling boss of a bumbling "fall guy." Some film historians argue that these "team" films created the base for the classic Laurel and Hardy partnership.
In 1916 Hardy moved to California, where he freelanced, appearing with Laurel in the two-reel (twenty-minute) comedy Lucky Dog the following year. He continued in short films, usually as a heavy or foil for such leading comics as Billy West, Jimmy Aubrey, and the acrobatic Larry Semon. In 1921 Hardy married actress Myrtle Lee Reeves; their childless marriage ended in divorce in 1937. In 1925 he portrayed the Tin Woodman in a Jazz Age version of The Wizard of Oz. By the time Hardy joined Hal Roach's Comedy All-Stars in 1926, he had appeared in several features and more than 100 short films and was regarded as a solid, instinctive performer who could steal scenes from the stars. When Hardy was injured, Laurel substituted for him in Get 'Em Young (1926). The following year the two men began to appear together in All-Star Comedies.
Beginning with Slipping Wives (1927), Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy appeared together in thirteen All-Star comedies before becoming a team in Duck Soup (1927). With Hardy, Laurel slowed down, creating deliberate, "holding" sequences and developing a comic situation to unbearable hilarity. He became "Stan," an abstracted reactor to Hardy's various self-destructions. Hardy became "Ollie," large, pompous, courtly, and inept. Both carried gentility to heights of absurdity. The duo's working habits formed quickly. A compulsive worker, Laurel created the gags while the self-indulgent Hardy went to the links or the track. It is said that Laurel was able to provoke one of Hardy's characteristic on-camera reactions--a disbelieving exasperation--by asking for another take when Hardy was headed for golf. Between 1927 and 1932 Laurel and Hardy made sixty-five short films for Roach. Despite the studio's partylike atmosphere, a two-reeler could be turned out in two weeks. The Boys, as they were called, proved to be inspired improvisers, and Roach gave them the time and creative freedom they needed.
Hats Off (1927) introduced one of Laurel and Hardy's standard gags--the "tit for tat" battle, a vignette of studied retaliatory aggression, in this case a wildly burgeoning de-hatting. The Battle of the Century (1927) was the climax to film's early obsession with pie-throwing; between three and five thousand pies were hurled in an escalation of communal madness. Two Tars (1928) turned one bent fender into a demolition derby. Big Business (1929) capped the Boys' fumbling attempts to sell Christmas trees with the decorous destruction of two houses. Another early classic, Leave 'Em Laughing (1928), caused the mother of all traffic jams in Culver City after a sudden infusion of laughing gas.
As "Stan" and "Ollie" developed, their work clearly distinguished itself from its vaudeville antecedents. There was no straight man or fall guy. As Scott Nollen wrote, "Laurel and Hardy function as a unit. Stan cannot effectively function without Ollie to tell him what to do, and Ollie cannot get anything done without Stan . . . [yet] as a unit, they never actually accomplish anything."
In Unaccustomed As We Are (1929), the team's first sound film, Laurel was first heard to say "Any nuts?" which immediately became a running gag. The Boys made a perfect transition to sound. Their voices--Stan's was squeaky; Ollie's, incongrously prissy--fitted their characters. Sound brought Ollie's mournful wail as he tumbles toward another disaster; their barbed verbal mangles ("You are finally using my brains," "He who filters your good name, steals trash," "Honesty is the best politics," "Now you're taking me illiterally"); Ollie's doublethink, veering from "Don't you ever get anything right?" to the (bemused, in the face of surreal truth) "You know, Stanley, I think you're right"; and Laurel's unexpected eruditions.
Many theaters began to bill their films above the features, but the growing popularity of cartoons began to weaken the audience appeal of short films. However, in Helpmates (1931), Laurel and Hardy began to develop an increasingly familiar theme: the relationship between bumbling husbands and overbearing wives. Neither Hardy's bumbling courtliness nor Laurel's immaturity held much appeal for women. In Twice Two (1933), their last word on the unequal battle of the sexes, they played their own wives.
Laurel and Hardy's first full-length feature was Pardon Us (1931). In the Academy Award-winning three-reel The Music Box (1932) the Boys repeatedly move a large piano up the steepest hill in Los Angeles, pausing for a dainty soft-shoe dance on the crate. By this time, Laurel's whimpering baby cry--Roach once said, "Laurel never cried when he was mad . . . when he was hurt . . . when he was scared. He only cried when he was confused; that's why it's so funny"--and his head scratch (which created what biographer John McCabe called "a natural fright wig"), as well as Hardy's delicate "extended pinky, gracious hat tip and tie twiddle," had become world famous. En route to England in 1932, the pair was mobbed in Chicago; at Southampton they were greeted by thousands whistling and singing "The Song of the Cuckoos," their theme.
Beginning with the short film Thicker Than Water (1935), surreal elements--prefiguring Hollywood's "screwball comedy" decade--characterized Laurel and Hardy's work. In that film their blood transfusions gradually turn them into each other; as settings change, Laurel pulls the new scene across the screen like a shade. In the feature Way Out West (1937) the Boys, dudes in the wilds, dance a decorous buck-and-wing, sing "The Trail of the Lonesome Pine" (it became England's number-two hit song), and work their "triple-gag" to perfection. Stan successfully flicked his thumb to light cigarettes (Laurel called this "white magic"), something Ollie tried thrice before it worked, nearly scaring him to death. In another feature, Swiss Miss (1938), they attempt to haul a piano across an Alpine suspension bridge, whereupon they are met by a gorilla.
The biggest Laurel and Hardy money-maker was the less distinguished Bonnie Scotland (1935). They broke with Roach after a dispute over salaries--Laurel always made twice as much as Hardy because he did twice as much work--and one more knockabout, Block-Heads (1938). Hardy appeared with Harry Langdon rather than Laurel in Zenobia (1939). They were unable to produce their own films, and a radio series never materialized. At the 1939 World's Fair in San Francisco, the Boys performed Laurel's "The Driver's License," a triumph of illogicality. In it, Ollie, applying for a license, cannot write; Stan, his helper, can't read. The following year Hardy married Virginia Lucille Jones. They had no children.
In 1940-1941 a Laurel and Hardy stage show toured the nation. The Boys gave more than five hundred performances for servicemen during wartime. Laurel and Hardy's films for MGM and 20th Century-Fox became formulaic after 1940. The Bullfighters (1945) was their last American film. Laurel later wrote, "We had no say in those films, and it sure looked it. We had done too many films in our own way for us to keep taking anything like that."
In postwar America the Boys' film career seemed effectively over. They made their first tour of British music halls in 1947 playing "The Driver's License." In 1950 Hardy appeared in two films without Laurel, The Fighting Kentuckian and Riding High. In 1951-1952 Laurel and Hardy went to France to make an unsuccessful film released under three different titles--Atoll K, Utopia, and Robinson Crusoeland--such was the chaos surrounding the project. During the filming Laurel underwent a prostate operation. In 1953 the Boys toured Ireland and England performing Laurel's "Birds of a Feather," a demented tale of whiskey testers who drive a psychiatrist mad with bird-talk. The tour ended because of Hardy's illness. By this time Laurel and Hardy's old films had become popular on television, and in 1954 they made their last public appearance on the television show "This Is Your Life."
In 1955 Hal Roach, Jr., signed Laurel and Hardy for four, one-hour television films under the series title Fabulous Fables, which were to feature Laurel's "white magic" applied to tales such as Babes in the Woods. Before the series could begin, Hardy suffered a paralytic stroke. His death in North Hollywood was contemporaneous with The Golden Age of Comedy (1957), the first of several archive homages reviving silent film.
Through his long years of partnership with Hardy, Laurel had married and divorced repeatedly. In 1934 he married Virginia Ruth Rogers in Mexico, repeating the ceremony after his divorce from Neilson took effect. This marriage lasted until 1937, though they remarried in 1941 and again divorced in 1946. In 1937 Dahlberg sued Laurel, claiming common-law wife status. (The suit was settled out of court.) In 1938 Laurel married Vera Ivanova Sauvalova, a Russian singer-dancer; they divorced in 1940. In 1946 he married Ida Kataeva Raphael, a singer and film actress.
In later years Laurel, suffering from diabetes, lived in a small apartment, answering all his own mail. In 1961 he won a special award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Another followed in 1963 from the Screen Actors Guild. Before his death, he joked with a nurse who was injecting him: "I'd rather be skiing." To the nurse's predictable question, he answered, "No, but I'd rather be skiing than doing this." Laurel died in Santa Monica.
Years after their last performance, the Boys' appeal had hardly faded. After 1978, three attempts were made to produce Laurel and Hardy stage musicals. Laurel and Hardy tours were introduced in Los Angeles. A museum of Laurel and Hardy lore was established in Ulverston. Academic analyses of the Boys' humor began to pile up even before Laurel's death, inspiring him to quote fellow comic Buster Keaton: "When in the name of Christ will these people learn that what we did was gags, gags, gags, and then more gags, and nothing more than gags, set inside a pleasant little story?"