FIELDS, W.C.

original name William Claude Dukenfield born Jan. 29, 1880, Philadelphia, Pa., U.S. died Dec. 25, 1946, Pasadena, Calif. actor whose humorous pretensions, delivered with a wooden expression, soft nasal drawl, and flawlessly timed gestures (a lifted eyebrow, a flick of cigar ash), made him one of America's greatest comedians. Fields ran away from home at the age of 11 and within three years had begun a vaudeville juggling career that gained him considerable recognition. In 191521 he performed a comic juggling act on Broadway in the Ziegfeld Follies. He made the transition to comic acting on the stage in Poppy (1923), creating the character type of the grandiose fraud who flouts the conventional virtues of hard work and honesty. Fields's first important motion picture was Sally of the Sawdust (1925). By 1931 he had moved to Hollywood, and soon he was writing, directing, and improvising the action of the majority of his films. Fields was acclaimed for his portrayal of Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield (1935), as well as for landmarks of film comedy that include The Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935), You Can't Cheat an Honest Man (1939), The Bank Dick (1940), My Little Chickadee (1940), and Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941). Fields's screen persona is characteristically that of a pompous but kind-hearted windbag who dislikes small children and is occasionally bedeviled by a nagging wife.