Comedians who formed the first Hollywood film comedy team. The thin one, Stan Laurel (18901965), originally Arthur Stanley Jefferson, was born in Ulverston, Lancashire, NW England, UK. Laurel had been on stage in England and was Charlie Chaplin's understudy when his troupe toured the USA (1910, 1912), and began making silent films with Nuts in May (1917). The fat one, Oliver (Norvell) Hardy (Jr) (18921957), born in Harlem, Georgia, USA, began as a singer at age eight, left college to join a troupe of minstrels, then drifted into the film industry, making his film debut in Outwitting Dad (1914). Although they chanced to appear in the short film Lucky Dog (1917), they did not form their comedy team until 1927 with Slipping Wives. Together for three decades, they made more than 100 films, 27 of them features; their best efforts are generally thought to be their early (192731) shorts. Their contrasting personalities, general clumsiness, and disaster-packed predicaments made them a universally popular comedy duo. Hardy was fat, pretentious, and blustering, while Laurel was bullied, confused, and emotional. Laurel, the creative mind behind the foolishness, outlived Hardy to accept a special Oscar in 1960.
The members of the duo were the thin British-born and -reared Stan Laurel and his heavier American partner from the state of Georgia, Oliver Hardy. After a period appearing separately in several short films for the Hal Roach studio during the 1920s, they began appearing in movie shorts together in 1926, and Laurel and Hardy officially became a team in 1927. Between 1927 and 1940, they starred in sixty-two shorts and thirteen feature films (discounting numerous cameo roles in others' films), becoming Hal Roach's most famous and lucrative stars.The pair left the Roach studio in 1940, then appeared in eight low-budget comedies for 20th Century Fox and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer until 1944, when they retired from films to concentrate on their stage show.
History
Before the pairing
Stan Laurel
Stan Laurel (June 16, 1890 – February 23, 1965) was born Arthur Stanley Jefferson in Ulverston, Lancashire (now Ulverston, Cumbria), England.
Laurel began his career in Glasgow Britannia Theatre of Varieties and Panopticon music hall, colloquially know as as the Panopticon, at the age of 16, where he crafted a comedy act largely derivative of famous music hall comedians of the day, including George Roby and Dan Leno. Producer Hal Roach later speculated that this was due in part to the difficulty in photographing Laurel's pale blue eyes on early pre-panchromatic film stock, perhaps giving the appearance of blindness, which audiences may have found disturbing.
Oliver Hardy
Oliver Hardy (January 18, 1892 – August 7, 1957) was born Norvell Hardy in Harlem, Georgia near Augusta, Georgia, in the United States of America.
Before Hardy started his film career as a "heavy" actor in 1914 (Outwitting Dad), he had been a movie house projectionist/manager at the Palace Theater in Milledgeville, GA.
Hardy was a trained singer, and often enjoyed performing for those on the set as well as singing in his own movies.
"Stan" and "Ollie": Hal Roach years
The first film encounter of the two comedians (as separate performers) took place in The Lucky Dog, produced in 1919 by Sun-Lite Pictures and released in 1921.
From 1927 onwards, the pair starred in Hal Roach comedies, including silent shorts, talkie shorts and feature films. While most silent-film actors saw their careers decline with the advent of sound, Laurel and Hardy made a successful transition in 1929 with the short Unaccustomed As We Are. Laurel's English accent and Hardy's Southern American accent and singing brought new dimensions to their characters.
Laurel and Hardy's shorts, produced by Hal Roach and released through Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, were among the most successful in the business. In 1931, Laurel and Hardy made their first feature film (in which they were the stars) Pardon Us. Following the success of this film, the duo reduced the number of shorts they made to concentrate on feature films. Future Laurel and Hardy features included Pack Up Your Troubles (1932), Fra Diavolo (or The Devil's Brother, 1933), Sons of the Desert (1933), and Babes in Toyland (1934). Laurel and Hardy made the classic short The Music Box in 1932, which won the first Academy Award for Best Short Subject, Comedy.
Because of the competition from the double feature and block booking, Hal Roach cancelled all of his short subject series, save for Our Gang.
Style of comedy and notable routines
The humour of Laurel and Hardy was generally slapstick in nature. A typical sequence would be their collaboration on the construction of a house: Hardy holds a number of nails in his mouth, Laurel warmly claps him on the back, Hardy swallows the nails. For example, Laurel might light his pipe by flicking his thumb upwards from his clenched fist as if he held a cigarette lighter. However, when the pair were finished, the opponent would then calmly retaliate by damaging something that Laurel and Hardy valued, while the pair strangely refrained from defending themselves.
On-screen characterizations
The Laurel and Hardy on-screen characters are of two supremely brainless, eternally optimistic men, almost brave in their perpetual and impregnable innocence.
Laurel and Hardy had an inbuilt physical contrariety to aid them, and they enhanced this ludicrousness with little touches, being very careful never to desert reality.
Inescapably, the ideogram for Laurel and Hardy is a pair of derby hats. Whatever else they are, they are gentlemen -- "Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy."
Off-screen, Laurel and Hardy were the opposite of their movie characters: Laurel was the driven, ambitious leader, while Hardy was more easygoing. Horne, and others on Laurel and Hardy films, somewhere between twenty-five and ninety-five percent of each was reworked by Stan Laurel on his own. Laurel would rewrite entire sequences or scripts, have the cast and crew improvise on the soundstage, and meticulously reviewed film dailies, often moonlighting to achieve all of these tasks. While Hardy also made contributions to the routines, he preferred to follow Laurel's lead and spent most of his free time on hobbies such as golf.
Decline
By 1936, the relationship between Laurel and Hardy was under strain, and both were distanced from Hal Roach. Laurel in particular frequently argued with Roach, and extended stand-off periods became common during the late 1930s. Laurel and Hardy made two more films for Roach before they split with the studio in 1940.
Hoping for greater artistic freedom, Laurel and Hardy signed with the larger studios 20th Century Fox and MGM. Only one of the Fox films, Jitterbugs, has received some recognition in recent years, mainly because the team was given a little more creative freedom and Hardy worked well with actress Lee Patrick.
In 1943, Laurel and Hardy filmed a silent sequence for the Department of Agriculture's patriotic short, The Tree in a Test Tube. The most remarkable thing about the film, narrated by MGM's Pete Smith, was that it was filmed in Kodachrome, only the second of their films to be shot in color. (There are also color home movies of Laurel and Hardy, some of which have been included in video releases of their Hal Roach films.)
Oliver Hardy made two solo appearances without Laurel in 1949.
After spending the rest of the 1940s performing on stage in Europe, Laurel and Hardy made one final film together in 1950. Atoll K (also known as Utopia) was a French-Italian co-production directed by Léo Joannon, which suffered language barriers, production problems, and Stan Laurel's grave health during shooting. The film was a commercial and critical disappointment, and brought an end to Laurel and Hardy's film careers.
Final years
After Atoll K, Laurel and Hardy took several months off, so that Laurel could recuperate. Upon their return to the European stage in the early 1950s, Laurel and Hardy undertook a successful series of public appearances in a short sketch Laurel had written called "Birds of a Feather". In 1955, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy made their final public appearance together, taking part on a BBC television programme about the Grand Order of Water Rats, the British variety organization. Laurel & Hardy provide a filmed insert during which they reminisce about their friends in British variety. Hear the audio and see a still picture from the TV broadcast at http://www.laurelandhardy.org/lastTV.htm
Under a doctor's advice, Hardy lost over one hundred pounds in 1956. A depressed Laurel did not attend his partner's funeral, due to his own ill health, explaining his absence with the line "Babe would understand."
For the remaining eight years of his life, Laurel refused to perform, even turning down Stanley Kramer's offer to make a cameo in his landmark 1963 movie, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. In 1960, Laurel was given a special Oscar for his contributions to film comedy;
Despite not appearing on-screen after Hardy's death, Laurel did contribute scripts and gags to several comedy filmmakers, and did some personal writing as well. The latter (who became a great friend of Laurel) did an imitation of Stan on his television show in the early 1960s, which Laurel saw and wrote — much to Van Dyke's amusement — a lengthy set of "tips" to perfect the imitation. Laurel would live until 1965, surviving to see the duo's work rediscovered through television and classic film revivals.
Afterwards
A few months after Laurel's death, the inaugural meeting of The Sons of the Desert, the official Laurel and Hardy appreciation society, was held in New York City.
Larry Harmon became the owner of Laurel and Hardy's likenesses in the mid-1960s, and co-produced a series of animated Laurel and Hardy cartoons in 1966 with Hanna-Barbera Productions. The animated versions of Laurel and Hardy also guest-starred in a 1972 episode of Hanna-Barbera's The New Scooby-Doo Movies. Harmon voiced Laurel in the 1966 series, with Jim MacGeorge voicing Hardy;
In 1999, Larry Harmon produced a direct-to-video film, The All-New Adventures of Laurel and Hardy: For Love of Mummy, based upon the films of Laurel and Hardy. The film dealt with Laurel and Hardy's identical nephews falling into some of the same messes that their legendary uncles fell into. Laurel and Hardy films have appeared frequently in television syndication and on cable television networks such as American Movie Classics, Turner Classic Movies, The Family Channel, and the Hallmark Channel.
Trivia
As with many other comedy teams of the day, such as The Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy used their real names in their films. Throughout Laurel and Hardy's career, the driving force behind the team was Laurel, who wrote the scripts and frequently produced (and sometimes directed) the films, and always insisted on being paid twice as much as Hardy. Part of Laurel and Hardy's on-screen appearance called for their faces to be filmed flat, without any shadows or dramatic lighting. Art Lloyd was once quoted as saying "Well, I'll never win an Oscar [for Laurel and Hardy cinematography], but I'll sure please Stan Laurel." Laurel and Hardy's famous signature tune, known as "The Cuckoo Song", "Ku-Ku", or "The Waltz of the Cuckoos", was composed by Roach musical director Marvin Hatley as the on-the-hour chime for the Roach studio radio station. Laurel heard the tune on the station, and asked Hatley to use it as the Laurel and Hardy theme song. In Laurel's eyes, the song's melody represents Oliver Hardy's character (pompus and dramatic), while the harmony represents Laurel's own character (somewhat out of key, and only able to register two notes: "coo-coo"). The official Laurel and Hardy appreciation society is known as "The Sons of the Desert", after a fraternal society in the film of the same name. It was founded in New York in 1965 with the sanction of Stan Laurel. Ulverston, the place of Stan Laurel's birth, now hosts the Laurel and Hardy Museum. Another Laurel and Hardy Museum is located in the place of Oliver Hardy's birth, Harlem, Georgia. Because the original films were filmed in black and white, very few people knew that Stan Laurel actually had red hair, and so he is depicted as having brown hair in colorized shorts released by Hal Roach Studios. Interestingly enough, both colorized versions of March of the Wooden Soldiers have Laurel's correct hair color. Stan Laurel reportedly grew to hate the "crying" routine that he used when Oliver Hardy would berate him for his incompetence, but the showman in him compelled him to keep using it, because he perceived that the audience expected it. Oliver Hardy's catchphrase is often misquoted as "Well, there's another fine mess you've gotten me into". In 2006, BBC Four showed a drama based on Laurel meeting Hardy on his deathbed and reminiscing about their career called Stan (Website). Dreis" may have been the source of Laurel and Hardy's on stage persona - here is a photo of "Zuhn & Dreis" - Laurel and Hardy make an appearance as Roman legionaries in the Asterix comic, Obelix and Co.Laurel and Hardy in other languages
Albanian Olio me Stelion Arabic El Tikhin Ouel Roufain Danish Gøg og Gokke Dutch De Dikke en de Dunne (The Fat One and the Thin One) Finnish Ohukainen ja Paksukainen (Skinny and Fatty) French Laurel et Hardy German Laurel und Hardy, Stan und Ollie, Dick und Doof (Fat and Dumb) Greek Χονδρός και Λιγνός Chondros kai Lighnos (The Fat One and the Thin One) Hebrew Hashamen ve Haraze Hungarian Stan és Pan Italian Stanlio e Ollio Korean 홀쭉이와 뚱뚱이 (Holjjugi wa Ddungddungi) (Skinny and Fatty) Kurdish Laurel û Hardy Maltese L-Ohxon u l-Irqiq (The Fat One and the Thin One) Norwegian Helan og Halvan (The Whole and the Half) Polish Flip i Flap Portuguese (in Brazil) O Gordo e o Magro (The Fat One and the Thin One) Portuguese (in Portugal) Bucha e Estica (Chubby and Stretch) Romanian Stan şi Bran Serbian Stanlio i Olio, Станлио и Олио Spanish El Gordo y el Flaco (The Fat One and the Thin One) Swedish Helan och Halvan (The Whole and the Half) Turkish Lorel ile HardiBibliography
Everson, William K. The Complete Films of Laurel and Hardy. Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy: An Affectionate Biography.Compare to
Abbott and Costello Penn and Teller Kenan and Kel Bulk and Skull (from Power Rangers) The Chuckle Brothers (see Chucklevision) Gilligan and The Skipper from Gilligan's Island Martin and Lewis Little and Large C-3PO and R2-D2 from Star Wars Fry and LaurieSee also: Double act
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