Stan Laurel

Stan Laurel, along with his comedy partner Oliver Hardy, was a household name for decades and remains a widely recognised screen presence from the early days of cinema. As a writer, director and actor, he made a significant contribution to the emerging Hollywood film industry and by the 1950s was one of its biggest names.

Arthur Stanley Jefferson, as he was originally known, was born in England. His family moved to Glasgow when he was a child because his father had taken a job as manager of the city’s Metropole Theatre. With an actress mother and a childhood steeped in variety theatre it was almost inevitable that the young Stan would follow in his parents’ footsteps.

He made his stage debut at the city’s Britannia Music Hall when he was 16 and worked on the door of the theatre run by his father collecting tickets. With his first comedy double act, the Barto Bros he toured the Netherlands and Belgium on the back of which he was offered a place in an American vaudeville troupe in 1913.

Fred Karno, whose group of actors also included Charlie Chaplin, taught Laurel many of the slapstick comedy skills that he would later make such good use of in his films. After nearly a decade of touring theatres, Laurel gave up the stage for films in which he combined acting, writing and directing from the start.

In 1926 he signed a contract with the Hal Roach studio where he became friends with fellow actor Oliver Hardy. Together they made dozens of short films and became an enormously popular double act as well as a critical success; their three-reel film, The Music Box, won an Academy Award for Best Short Subject in 1932.

Laurel and Hardy also made a handful of feature films before returning to their roots in vaudeville with a sell-out tour to the UK in 1947. The tour, which included an appearance at the Royal Variety Performance, was a great success and the pair spent the next seven years on tour around the UK and Europe.

Laurel was devastated when Hardy died in 1957 and never returned to acting. He was given an Academy lifetime achievement award in 1961 and spent his final years answering fan mail and mentoring young comedy performers at the outset of their careers, such as Dick van Dyke and Jerry Lewis.