Comprehensive information and links about Laurel and Hardy

Laurel and Hardy in Ulverston, Lancashire (now Ulverston, Cumbria), England. Laurel began his career as a comedian in Scottish music halls and went on to be an understudy to Charlie Chaplin in Fred Karno's comedy company. He emigrated to America in 1910 and embarked on a vaudeville career. He made his first film appearance in 1917 (), continuing to make more than 50 silent one- and two-reelers for a variety of producers, including Bronco Billy Anderson, Hal Roach Studios, and Universal.

While he experienced modest success as a solo comedian, wide-spread fame eluded him. Producer Hal Roach 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, but it seems more likely to have been attributable to a lack of an identifiable or easily marketable screen character, like that of Chaplin, Harold Lloyd or Buster Keaton, as well as personal problems he was experiencing at the time.

in Harlem, Georgia, near Augusta. When he turned 18, he changed his first name to that of his father, who died before he was a year old, thenceforth calling himself "Oliver Norvell Hardy". He was nicknamed '"Babe".

Before Hardy started his film career as a "heavy" (i.e. villain) in 1914 ( in Milledgeville, GA. Hardy went on to appear in more than 250 silent one- and two-reelers, only about 100 of which are extant. He starred in the 1939 feature film without Laurel, playing a role similar to the "Ollie" persona, opposite one-time silent film comedian Harry Langdon, as well as in with John Wayne in 1949.

Hardy had a pleasant singing voice, and often enjoyed performing between takes on the set, as well as in several of his own movies.

(June 1927), directed by Fred Guiol and supervised by Leo McCarey, who suggested that Laurel and Hardy be paired permanently.

From then on they worked exclusively as a team in a series of silent shorts, talkie shorts and feature films – 106 in all. They made a great number of popular shorts before their first feature film with director James Parrott, (1931). At the urging of Roach, the duo reduced the number of shorts they made to concentrate on feature films, such as in 1932, which won the Academy Award for Best Short Subjects, Comedy, and ceased making shorts all together in 1935.

The duo's subsequent feature films (produced by Roach and released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) were includes the famous song "The Trail of the Lonesome Pine," sung by Laurel and Hardy with cowboy singers The Avalon Boys (Don Brookins, Art Green, Walter Trask and Chill Wills). The song was released as a single in 1975 and reached No. 2 in the UK charts.

Style of comedy and notable routines

The humor of Laurel and Hardy was often slapstick in nature, often employing Laurel's character as dominant (although Hardy always presumed he had the upper hand), usually to Hardy's chagrin. 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.

In some cases, the comedy bordered on the surreal. For example, Laurel might light his pipe by flicking his thumb upwards from his clenched fist as if he held a cigarette lighter. His thumb would ignite, and he would light his pipe. Hardy, seeing this, would attempt to duplicate it. When, after many attempts he actually would achieve the same effect, he would be surprised to discover that his thumb was actually burning, and would cry in pain and hastily blow it out.

A famous shtick the team often performed was a bizarre kind of "tit-for-tat" fight with an opponent. In the basic scenario, the pair would begin the fight by damaging something that the opponent valued, while the opponent did not defend himself. When the pair were finished, the opponent would then calmly retaliate by damaging something that Laurel and Hardy valued, while the pair refrained from defending themselves. The pair then dispassionately retaliated with an escalating act of vandalism and so on, until both sides were simultaneously destroying property in front of each other.

This dynamic was perhaps most famously demonstrated in the 1929 short , in which Stan and Ollie play Christmas tree salesmen. The central conflict begins with frequent foil Jimmy Finlayson slamming his door on the tree, cutting it in half, followed by Laurel prying off his house numbers with a penknife, and ends with Finlayson blowing up Laurel and Hardy's car while they lay waste to his house. Variations on this theme can be found in the team's films. Sometimes it is the opponent who is the instigator. Frequently, the back-and-forth reprisals did not focus on destruction of property but on personal physical assaults (i.e. the alternating tactics of a pie fight).

The duo, especially Ollie, would often break the "fourth wall" by making eye contact with the camera, expressing a degree of annoyance, impatience or exasperation, when the other half of the duo was doing something silly.

Throughout their career the driving force was Laurel, who wrote many of their comedy bits and

Decline

By 1936, the relationship between "the boys" and Hal Roach was showing signs of strain. Laurel in particular frequently argued with Roach, and extended stand-off periods became common during the late-1930s. One reason for this was Laurel and Hardy were now only making features instead of shorts, forcing Roach to assert more financial and, much to Laurel's chagrin, artistic control over their films. Other points of conflict involved Hal Roach's declining interest in the team in favor of his popular Topper series, Roach's "morals clause" as applied to Laurel's private life (he had a series of very public divorces and battles with alcoholism), and the fact the team were under separate contracts that expired at different times, which Roach used to his advantage in his business dealings with them. The film , made after Laurel's contract expired, pairing Hardy with one-time silent film star Harry Langdon, was made during this time, and was interpreted by Laurel as an attempt by Roach to drive a wedge between the team.

In 1938, the Roach studio switched distributors from MGM to United Artists. In 1939 relations thawed enough between the parties to negotiate a three picture deal to be produced by Stan Laurel Productions. It was a temporary reprieve, and Laurel and Hardy made before they split for good with Roach in 1940.

They signed with larger studios (20th Century Fox, MGM), where they were relegated to the B-film divisions, making eight more films through 1945. These are recognised as their least amusing efforts, as they had no creative control and Stan Laurel's input was ignored in favor of recycled gags from old films, and hackneyed, banal s written by mediocre screenwriters who had virtually no understanding of their screen personas, forcing the duo into situations, plots and dialogue completely alien to the characters they had created at Roach. From playing naive, likeable innocents who were entirely "of" their world, they were relegated to playing irritating, elderly misfits.

After spending the rest of the 1940s performing onstage in Europe, Laurel and Hardy made one final film together in 1950, the French-set ), directed by Léo Joannon. It was supposed to be shot in twelve weeks, eventually it took over twelve months to complete due to Laurel's ill-health, and is considered to be an abomination by most fans of the team (though it has been rediscovered by a new generation of viewers thanks to the film having fallen into the public domain).

After taking several months off to recouperate, Laurel and Hardy undertook a successful series of public appearances in a short sketch Laurel had written called and in the early 1950s were negotiating again with Hal Roach for a series of television specials to be called when Laurel was felled by a stroke. While he was recouperating, Hardy's health also began to decline.

Oliver Hardy died in 1957 at the age of 65 after a debilitating series of strokes, and was interred in The Valhalla Memorial Park Cemetery in North Hollywood, California. Laurel did not attend his partner's funeral due to his own ill health, explaining his absence with the line "Babe would understand." People who knew Laurel said he was devastated by Hardy's death and never fully recovered.

For the remaining eight years of his life, Laurel refused to perform, but did occasionally contribute gags to several comedy filmmakers, and did some personal writing as well. He was anonymously assisted financially by Frank Sinatra. Stan Laurel died in Santa Monica, California in 1965 at the age of 74, and is buried at Forest Lawn-Hollywood Hills in Los Angeles, California.

As with many other comedy teams of the day, such as The Three Stooges, Stan and Ollie used their real names in their films.Stan Laurel always maintained that, in order for their characters to remain believable in the often outlandish circumstances they found themselves in, they must appear childlike and relatively innocent. To help achieve this effect both Laurel and Hardy wore a light colored pancake makeup known as "clown white," and insisted that their faces be filmed in such a way as to appear essentially "flat," like a blank canvas. This required Roach cameramen such as Art Lloyd and Francis Corby to photograph their scenes without an abundance of shadows or dramatic lighting, so as to avoid unnecessary contrast in their facial features. Lloyd was once quoted as saying, "well, I'll never win an Oscar [for Laurel Beginning in the mid-30's, Laurel removed the heels of his shoes to give his character a flat-footed walk. Additionally, Laurel used mascara on the inside of his lids to make his eyes appear smaller.Their famous signature tune, known as "The Cuckoo Song", "Ku-Ku", or "The Waltz of the Cuckoos", was composed by Roach musical director T. 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 original theme was first used in 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.Dick Van Dyke, a major fan of Stan's and who patterned some of his physical comedy after him, hosted a TV special, , the duo was voted the 7th greatest comedy act ever by fellow comedians and comedy insiders, making them the most popular double act on the list.In 1991 many of the duo's films were restored and occasionally subjected to the controversial practice of "digital colorization." Because the original films were filmed in black and white, very few people knew that Stan actually had red hair. In the colorized films, his hair was made brown, most likely because film audiences mistakenly knew him as a brunette from the black and white films.Stan reportedly grew to hate the "crying" schtick that he used when Ollie 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". The quote is "Well there's another NICE mess you've gotten me into."