Oliver Hardy
Norvell Hardy (Harlem, Georgia, January 18, 1892-Los Angeles, California, August 7, 1957), better known as Oliver Hardy, was a American actor and comedian. He is remembered for being a member of one of the most recognized comedy couples in cinema, El Gordo y el Flaco (Laurel y Hardy), with his friend Stan Laurel.
Early Years
Hardy's parents were of English and Scottish descent. His father, Oliver, was a Confederate veteran who was wounded at the Battle of Antietam on September 17, 1862. After the war he worked as a foreman for the Georgia Southern Railroad, supervising the construction of the track between Augusta and Madison. He married the widow Emily Norvell on March 12, 1890; it was Emily's second marriage, and the third for Oliver, who would die before Norvell was a year old.
When Hardy was born, the family had moved to Harlem, Georgia. Hardy was a troubled kid. He was not interested in education, but he acquired an early interest in music and theater, possibly from clients at the hotel his mother ran when she became a widow. He ran away from home to join a theater group, and later ran away from a boarding school near Atlanta. His mother recognized his talent for singing and sent him to Atlanta to study music and singing with a prestigious music teacher, but Hardy would skip his lessons to go sing at a vaudeville house. So his mother sent him to a military college, where he had a hard time, but she didn't soften his character. After toying with the idea of studying law in Georgia, he decided to follow his impulses and start a singing career.
In 1910, a movie theater opened in his future hometown of Milledgeville, and he landed jobs as projectionist, box office attendant, doorman, and manager. He soon became attracted to the new movie industry, which he watched every night as he showed them. He was convinced that he was capable of doing it just as well as those actors he saw on the screen. There was also another factor: Hardy had always been a very obese child, and that gave him a complex, and the fact of seeing how an also obese actor, Roscoe Arbuckle, was one of the great movie stars of the moment and who used the nickname Fatty, stimulated him to start his own film career.
A friend suggested that he move to Jacksonville, as movies were being made there. He did so in 1913, working as a cabaret and vaudeville singer by night, and getting a job at the Lubin studios by day. At that time he met and married what would be his first wife, the pianist Madelyn Saloshin.
Solo Race
The following year he starred in his first film, Outwitting Dad, for the Lubin studio. He went by the name Oliver Norvell Hardy, after his father. In his personal life he was known as Babe Hardy, a nickname given to him by an Italian barber, who applied talcum powder to Oliver's cheeks and said: nice-a-bab- and . In many of his later films with Lubin he was introduced as Babe Hardy.
Hardy was a large man, at 6'2" tall and weighing up to 250 pounds. That size limited him when it came to being able to do certain roles. He was often selected for the role of the "tough guy"; or villain. But he also had roles in small comedies, the size of him complementing his good nature.
By 1915 he had made fifty one-reel shorts for the Lubin studio. He moved to New York where he also performed at the Pathé, Casino and Edison Studios companies. Returning to Jacksonville, he made films for the Vim and King Bee companies. There he worked with Charlie Chaplin impersonator Billie West and comedic actress Ethel Burton Palmer (Hardy continued to play the villainous role in westerns into the early 1920s, often imitating the Eric Campbell of the movies). of Chaplin). In 1917 Hardy moved to Los Angeles and freelanced for various Hollywood studios. The following year he would appear in the film The Lucky Dog , produced by G. M. (Broncho Billy) Anderson and starring a young English actor named Stan Laurel. Hardy played a thief trying to hold up Laurel's character. It would take many years to work together again.
Between 1918 and 1923 Oliver Hardy made more than forty films for Vitagraph, playing the "thug" for Larry Semon. In 1919 he would separate from his wife, to later divorce in 1920, due to Babe's infidelities. But a year later, on November 24, 1921, Babe would remarry actress Myrtle Reeves. This marriage did not work out either, as Myrtle gradually fell into alcoholism.
In 1924 Hardy joined Hal Roach Studios working on the Our Gang films and with Charlie Chase. In 1925 he starred in Yes, Yes, Nanette! starring Jimmy Finlayson, who years later would become a fixture in Laurel and Hardy films. The film was directed by Stan Laurel. Hardy continued to play supporting roles in films by Clyde Cooke and Bobby Ray.
In 1926 a leg of lamb changed the future of both Oliver and Stan. Hardy had been cast in the film Get 'Em Young but was unexpectedly hospitalized after burning himself on a roast leg of lamb. Laurel, who had been working at Roach Studios as a gag man and director, replaced him. From then on, Laurel began to spend more time in front of the camera than behind it, and that same year she would appear again in a film with Hardy, 45 Minutes from Hollywood, although they did not share any scenes.
Laurel and Hardy
In 1927, Laurel and Hardy would star in their first films Slipping Wives, Goose Soup (not to be confused with the Marx Brothers film of the same name) and With Love and Hisses, though they weren't yet a comedic couple, but were two independent actors in the same movies. Roach Studios supervising director Leo McCarey saw the potential in the pairing and was likely the one who encouraged the comics to form a duo, which became a reality later that year. One of the most famous comic teams of all time had been created.
They began producing a number of short films, including The Battle of the Century (1927) (with one of the biggest pie battles ever filmed), Should Married Men Go Home? (1928), Two Tars (1928). Unaccustomed As We Are in 1929 would mark his easy transition into talkies. Berth Marks (1929), Blotto (1930), Brats (1930) (with Stan and Ollie playing themselves and their children, using enormous furniture for the scenes of little Laurel and Hardy), Another Fine Mess (1930), Be Big! (1931), among others. In 1929 they appeared in their first film as part of the cast of actors who appeared in the Hollywood Revue of 1929 (promotional films) and the following year appeared as comic foil to opera singer Lawrence Tibbets] (and in Technicolor) in the movie The Song of the Steppe. This film would mark his first appearance in color. In 1931 they made their first feature film as protagonists, Pardon Us. But they continued making short films until 1935. Their greatest recognition came when the film The Music Box (1932) won the Academy Award for Best Short Film, it would be the only one they would win.
In 1932 Laurel and Hardy began a six-week tour of Great Britain, Laurel's home country. A quiet trip had been planned, as they were not sure how they would be received in old Europe and were surprised by the large crowds of people who greeted them and followed them wherever they went. As a result of that it was decided to extend the tour by expanding it to Scandinavia, Belgium, France and they even performed once for King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. The tour was eventually extended over a year.
In 1933 they shot what is considered their best film, Sons of the Desert, whose repercussion was such that the film's title was chosen for the biggest fan club Oliver and Stan ever had, active today.
In 1936 Hardy's life suffered another blow when he divorced his second wife Myrtle. In 1939, while waiting for the contractual problems between Laurel and Hal Roach to be resolved (Laurel was fired and reinstated some time later), Hardy made a film, Zenobia, with the famous silent comic star Harry Langdon, whose career had taken a nosedive when the sound hit. The couple did not work out and Roach recognized that what the public wanted was to see Laurel and Hardy. So eventually the contract issues were resolved and the duo were 'loaned' to the UK. to the General Services Studio to star in The Flying Deuces. On that occasion, fate favored Hardy, since there he met and fell in love with Virginia Lucille Jones, a Script Girl . They married the following year and she accompanied Hardy until the day of his death.
Laurel and Hardy also worked for the USO (United Service Organizations, a volunteer organization to raise the morale of US troops around the world) supporting Allied troops during World War II. They also made A Chump at Oxford (1940) (where the roles are reversed for a moment, with Hardy being under the command of an expeditious Laurel) and Saps at Sea (1940).
In early 1941 the Laurel and Hardy films became of lower quality. They left Roach Studios and made movies first for 20th Century Fox, and later for MGM. But despite the fact that their salaries increased significantly (Laurel always earned more than Hardy) the big studios had very little control over their films, and those films lacked the quality and sense of humor and pacing that had made them worldwide. Famous.
In 1949 Hardy's friend John Wayne asked him if he wanted to play a supporting actor in the film The Fighting Kentuckian. Hardy had already worked with Wayne and John Ford a few years earlier in a benefit production of the play What Price Glory?, while Laurel was recovering from treatment for her diabetes. Skeptical at first, Hardy eventually agreed with Laurel's encouragement. Shortly after, Frank Capra invited Hardy to make a cameo in the film Riding High with Bing Crosby (1950). Hardy proved that he was a good actor and gives an idea of what his career would have been like if he had taken other avenues of acting.
In 1951 they made their last film, Atomic Robinsons (also known as Utopia). The plot was simple: Laurel inherits a ship and the boys go to sea, discovering a new island, rich in uranium, which makes them powerful, unleashing a proxy war with the island's new visitors. The film was produced by a consortium of European interests, with an international cast who were unable to understand each other. You see a noticeably more obese Hardy and a visibly sick Laurel, who, in addition, had to rewrite the script to adapt it to the duo's comedic style. It was a difficult shoot and a sign of the final decline of the famous couple.
In 1952 they toured Europe again, whose great success caused them to return in 1953, but the latter was suspended when Hardy suffered a minor heart attack.
In 1955 the couple was hired by Hal Roach Jr (who had bought the studio from his father) to produce a television series called Laurel and Hardy's Fabulous Fables, but this project was never carried out. The couple's last public appearance was that same year in a fragment of a BBC program.
Last years
Hardy, worried about his excessive weight (his heart already gave him a fright during a British tour in 1953) decided, in 1956, to undergo a strict diet and dropped from 159 kilos to 95. His physical transformation was absolute and even caused the astonishment of his friends, who did not recognize "Ollie" in that slender figure. This so disturbed Hardy that thereafter he confined himself at home suffering from depression.
On the morning of September 14, 1956, he suffered a massive stroke that immobilized his entire body. He was hospitalized until October 13, when he was released and placed in the care of his wife and special nurses. He could only move his left arm and leg minimally and was unable to speak. Shortly afterward, he was diagnosed with cancer and Oliver Hardy's large frame shrank to under 120 pounds and terminally ill. Laurel, still recovering from his own stroke, would visit him when there was hope that he was lucid.
Died after a series of convulsive strokes at 7:25 a.m. on August 7, 1957 at age 65. The cause of death was recorded as severe cerebrovascular accident.
Oliver Hardy was discharged with Masonic rites at Pierce Brothers Beverly Hills Mortuary at 1 p.m. on August 19. The body was cremated and the ashes were interred in the Garden of Hope, the Masonic section of Valhalla Memorial Park, in North Hollywood.
Stan Laurel did not attend the funeral due to medical prescription. The press published a comment of his: «What can I say? He was like a brother to me. This is the end of the Laurel and Hardy story."
Filmography
- Oliver Hardy Film: Hardy solo Films
- Filmography of Laurel and Hardy