Laurel and Hardy, one of the most popular comedy teams in motion-picture history. Actors Stan Laurel (1890-1965) and Oliver Hardy (1892-1957) were a pair of seemingly mismatched clowns whose screen chemistry proved equally potent in short silent films and in feature-length sound films. Laurel, the thin man of the duo, was born Arthur Stanley Jefferson in Ulverston, England. He learned his craft in British music halls, serving for a time as an understudy to English actor Charlie Chaplin. After a stint in American vaudeville, he made his screen debut in a two-reel short in 1917. The rotund Hardy, born Norvell Hardy in Harlem, Georgia, briefly studied law at the University of Georgia but dropped out to open a movie theater. He broke into films in 1913 playing supporting roles for the Florida-based Lubin Company.Both actors were drawn to Hollywood and spent several years appearing in slapstick comedies for producer Hal Roach, but it was not until 1926 that director Leo McCarey persuaded them to pair up formally in the otherwise unremarkable short Duck Soup. Almost immediately, Laurel and Hardy settled into the complementary identities that they maintained through more than 100 films. Laurel’s character was sweet-tempered, naive, and childlike, and Hardy played a pompous braggart who specialized in slowly building, indignant anger. Their characters generally existed on the margins of respectable society as outright bumblers who managed to bring forth chaos from any conceivable situation (hence Hardy’s oft-repeated line, “Here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into”).
Laurel and Hardy managed the transition to sound with ease. If anything, the act was enhanced by their distinctive, much-imitated voices. Under contract with the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio, the duo were often used as comic relief in musical variety pictures, such as Babes In Toyland (1934; also known as March of the Wooden Soldiers), but were at their best in straight comedy features like Sons of the Desert (1933). They retired from the screen in 1945, made an unsuccessful return to filmmaking in Utopia (also known as Atoll K, 1950), and were planning a second comeback attempt when Hardy was crippled by a stroke in 1954, effectively ending the partnership.
