LAUREL, STAN; AND HARDY, OLIVER

born June 16, 1890, Ulverston, Lancashire, Eng. died Feb. 23, 1965, Santa Monica, Calif., U.S. born Jan. 18, 1892, Harlem, Ga., U.S. died Aug. 7, 1957, North Hollywood, Calif. original names respectively Arthur Stanley Jefferson and Oliver Norvell Hardy, Jr. the first great Hollywood motion-picture comedy team. Stan Laurel, the skinny member of the team, performed in circuses, musicals, dramas, and vaudeville before acting in silent films. In 1926 he joined Oliver Hardy, the fat member of the partnership, who had traveled in the United States in singing and vaudeville acts and had been in silent comedies since 1913. The two men joined Hal Roach's studio separately in 1926, and Roach persuaded them to team up. Their first successful film comedy together was Putting Pants on Philip (1927). They made the transition to sound motion pictures fairly easily, using dialogue scantily for plot development. Laurel and Hardy made nearly 90 comedies from 1927 to 1951. Laurel, the bumbling and easily distressed innocent, acted as foil to the pompous and overbearing Hardy, whose confident mien was as unwarranted as his partner's fearful timidity. The pair frequently managed to convert simple, everyday situations into disastrous tangles by acts of incredible navet and stupidity. Laurel worked out most of the two men's comic routines. Many of Laurel and Hardy's best films were shorts made under the direction of Leo McCarey of the Hal Roach studios in the late 1920s and '30s. Among them are The Battle of the Century (1927), Leave 'em Laughing (1927), The Music Box (1932), Sons of the Desert (1933), and Way Out West (1937).