Trivia: See "Three Stooges"

Trivia: The "middle stooge" in the various incarnations of the Three Stooges, Larry Fine was most recognizable across his four decades in show business by his eccentric frizzed out hair. He occupied the awkward and often ill-defined position of "middle man," his presence necessary to give a gag body and a boost of action, and to keep it going to its conclusion. As an actor in the group's sketches, he was most often characterized as the wide-eyed nebbish, often nearly as surprised as any by-stander character by the physical comedy (and mayhem) taking place. His most memorable catch-phrases included "Moe, I didn't mean it" (usually followed by a slap from Moe), and "I'm a victim of circumstance" (which was used by Curly on occasion as well).And "victim of circumstance" might define his whole entre to the world of performing. He was born Louis Feinberg in Philadelphia, the son of a jeweler. One day while at his father's shop, an accident took place that resulted in his forearm being badly burned with aqua regia, the acid used to test the purity of gold. The doctor who treated him warned his parents that he would have to do something to strengthen the arm or he would lose it. That led to his taking up the violin, an instrument at which he became so proficient that the family considered sending him to Europe for advanced study, a plan that fell apart with the advent of the First World War He began playing the violin in vaudeville under the name Larry Fine, developing a routine in which he would play from a nearly sitting, knees-bent position, kicking his legs alternately. In 1925, he crossed paths with Moe Howard, who was already working, in tandem with his brother Shemp Howard as part of a comedy act with Ted Healy. He became part of the act and remained when Shemp left, to be replaced by another Howard brother, Curly (aka Jerome). The trio eventually left Healy's employ and struck out on their own as the Three Stooges. Over the course of 25 years and 190 short films at Columbia Pictures, they became one of the longest running movie comedy acts (if not always the most respected or beloved, especially by women) in history. Larry Fine's contribution was a mix of violin virtuosity (on display at various times across their history, from Punch Drunks, Disorder In The Court, and "Violent Is The Word For Curly" in the early/middle 1930s to Sweet And Hot in the late 1950s) and zany cluelessness, mixed with an occasional out-of-left-field ad-lib. Larry usually played the wide-eyed middle-stooge, but occasionally the plots of the trio's movies would allow him some variation on this characterization. In "Sweet And Hot," he plays a small-town boy who has made good as a stage producer, and whose intervention sets the plot (focused on characters played by Muriel Landers and Joe Besser) in motion; and in Rockin' In The Rockies, a full-length feature, as a result of a plot that split Moe Howard's character off from the trio, Larry plays the aggressive "head stooge," and is surprisingly good at it. But he was best known as the clueless middle stooge, often referred to by Moe as "porcupine" because of his hair-style. He kept on with the Stooges into the 1960s, but was forced to retire as his health -- damaged by a series of strokes -- deteriorated later in the decade. He passed away in 1975. He was so familiar, that in 1980, five years after his death, his name still turned up in popular culture. In episode two of the sitcom Bosom Buddies, when women's hotel manager Lucille Benson finds Tom Hanks' Kip Wilson in a female tenant's room, she pulls him by the ear down the hall, causing him to exclaim, "Who am I -- Larry Fine?" And in 1983, SCTV presented "Give 'Em Hell, Larry," a short bit (done as a TV promo spot) in which Joe Flaherty portrays James Whitmore (who had previously enjoyed major success playing President Harry Truman in the one-man show "Give 'Em Hell, Harry") performing the one-man show as Larry Fine -- it was among the funniest 60 seconds of television that season.

Trivia: Accidentally shot himself in the left ankle at age 12. Had his first marriage annulled because his mother disapproved of the union. Modeled famous "woo-woo-woo" sound on a similar gimmick used by comic Hugh Herbert Hated shaving his head because he thought it made him less appealing to women. His last film appearance, Hold That Lion, is the only Three Stooges short to co-star Curly along with his two brothers, Moe and Shemp. Was an avid dog lover, often picking up strays while the Stooges traveled and taking them with him from town to town.

Trivia: American actress Clara Kimball Young started making films as an ingénue at the Brooklyn-based Vitagraph Studios in 1912. She was skilled at both comedy and drama; one of her better roles was the hypnotized title character in Trilby (1917). Clara married James Young, a prominent actor and director, and saw to it that her fame would help promote his career, even after the marriage faltered. The actress was at her best in glossy (and profitable) soap operas, wherein she frequently played a woman victimized by duplicitous men; one such role, in 1919's The Loves of Sunya, had her playing opposite the novice Rudolph Valentino. By the time sound came in, Young had put on weight and become quite matronly; in addition, her voice was softer and more childlike than was suitable for her sophisticated image. The actress' sound career consisted of minor roles in A-films, character parts in Westerns and serials, and even one appearance as the non-plussed foil of the Three Stooges in the 1936 two-reeler Ants in the Pantry. She gallantly held up against all these career deprivations, surviving in films until 1941; one of her last parts was as a guest star in the low-budget Mister Celebrity (1941), in which, as part of the film's plot line, she shared pleasant reminiscences with fellow silent film favorite Francis X. Bushman, as well as with former boxing champ James Jeffries. Young was less sentimental in Hollywood Extra Girl, a 1935 short subject designed to promote Cecil B. De Mille's The Crusades. This time around, she was seen wearily explaining to a would-be starlet how heartbreaking and discouraging the motion picture business could be; it was a remarkably heartfelt performance. Before retiring for keeps, Clara Kimball Young made a few TV appearances in the late '40s and early '50s, at least one of them on a Los Angeles-based interview program hosted by a twentysomething Johnny Carson.

Trivia: Burly stage comedian and dialectician Harrison Greene came to Hollywood in 1933. In features, Greene was usually cast as a diplomat or aristocrat with a foreign accent to fit every occasion. He was seen to better advantage in short subjects, starring in the Pete Smith specialty Attention Suckers (1933) and essaying such supporting roles as exterminator A. Mouser in the Three Stooges' Ants in the Pantry (1936) and Bustoff the wrestler in another Stooge opus, Grips Grunts and Groans (1937). Elsewhere, Harrison Greene could be found playing slightly sinister foreigners in all three of Republic's Dick Tracy serials.

Trivia: There probably are actors who appeared in more movies than Bud Jamison did, but there can't be too many -- depending upon whose list one's using, Jamison appeared in anywhere from 253 to 284 pictures between 1915 and 1944, working alongside such screen legends as Charles Chaplin, Ginger Rogers, James Stewart, and Edward G. Robinson. Most of his performances in more-than-bit roles, however, were in short films, and it was his work as a foil in more than 50 two-reelers made by the Three Stooges that has immortalized Jamison's face and acting for generations. Born William Jamison in California, he entered vaudeville in his teens, and by 1915 was appearing in movies with Chaplin. Jamison's big-boned, beefy appearance -- which hid a surprising degree of agility -- and pugnacious expression made him an ideal antagonist for the lanky, diminutive Chaplin, and Jamison was one of his three favorite heavies, along with Eric Campbell and Mack Swain. He was Edna Purviance's beau in In the Park, the sinister hobo in The Tramp, and the chief bank robber in The Bank, among numerous other roles. Jamison remained busy throughout the 1920s, barely breaking stride for the coming of sound, although in a change of pace he did appear in some serious features, including the 1930 version of Moby Dick. He continued this pattern of working in comic short subjects, interspersed with occasional full-length features (in which he usually played bit parts) for the rest of his career. In 1934, Jamison began the association that was to keep his memory alive into the 21st century, when he appeared with the Three Stooges in their first Columbia Pictures short, Woman Haters. The Stooges and their producers obviously liked Jamison's work, because the actor subsequently performed in more than 50 additional Stooges films, usually playing belligerent cops, stuffy butlers, impatient customers, aggravated employers, and any number of other roles that placed him in opposition to the three inept protagonists. As likely to threaten the trio with mayhem as to have it worked on him, he had a beautifully expressive over-the-top voice that greatly enhanced the humor of his performances -- sometimes he was just the Stooges hapless employer, as in Violent Is the Word for Curly, portraying the service station owner giving them a pep talk ("Use a little elbow grease!") before leaving them to their own devices, whereupon they manage to destroy the first car that pulls in; or, in one of their greatest films, Disorder In the Court, he cut a memorable figure as the enthusiastic defense attorney, relying on the Stooges' testimony to get his client acquitted of murder charges; and in yet another short, as a butler faced with assigning serving tasks to Moe, Larry, and Curly, he expresses his impatience with their antics by insulting them: "Why, you remind me of the Three Stooges!" His career went far beyond the boundaries of the Stooges shorts, however, and Jamison was one of the busiest comic character men in Hollywood during the early '40s, appearing in more than 20 pictures in 1941 alone, and also one of the most energetic -- he showed off his boisterous side to great effect in the jail cell scene in George Marshall's Pot O' Gold, in which he manages to dominate a group of a dozen loudly singing actors (including James Stewart and Charles Winninger). He added Bud Abbott and Lou Costello to the long list of comic stars with whom he worked and seemed destined to be busy for years to come when tragedy struck. Jamison collapsed at home shortly after finishing his work on the musical comedy Nob Hill, late in September of 1944. He died the following day, although he had so much work in the can awaiting release that his movie appearances easily ran into 1945. The Three Stooges evidently loved working with Jamison, and used his image on a prop poster in a short that they made years after his death.

Trivia: Born in Ireland, actor Vesey O'Davoren started out with Dublin's Abbey Theatre. During WWI, he was caught in a mustard gas attack and lost his voice. To help himself heal, he moved to Hollywood and began appearing in silent films. By the time talkies were invented, he had recovered his voice and O'Davoren appeared in over two dozen films before retiring in the late '50s.

Trivia: Dublin-born Douglas Gerrard began working in the American film industry in 1913. From 1916 to 1920, Gerrard directed films bearing titles like Polly Put the Kettle On, Empty Cab and $5000 Reward. As an actor, he appeared in such films as Merchant of Venice (1914, as Bassanio), The Dumb Girl of Portici (1916) and Omar the Tentmaker (1922). Talkies reduced him to minor roles in films like One Way Passage (1932) and Under Two Flags (1936). It is one of the vagaries of fame that Douglas Gerrard is best known to contemporary audiences as the monocled "Lord Stoke Pogis" in the Three Stooges 2-reeler Ants in the Pantry (1936).

Trivia: Stage actress Anne O'Neal first showed up onscreen as a street singer in John Ford's The Informer. Well suited for such roles as spinsterish gossips and baleful landladies, O'Neal kept busy in the mid-'30s with the Columbia Pictures short-subject unit, serving as the foil for such comics as Andy Clyde and the Three Stooges. During the 1940s, she was a semi-regular in the one- and two-reel productions of MGM, showing up in the Passing Parade, Our Gang, and Crime Does Not Pay series. Her feature-film credits include such small but memorable roles as psychiatrist Porter Hall's neurotic secretary in Miracle on 34th Street (1947) and Miss Sifert in the cult classic Gun Crazy (1949). Anne O'Neal spent her last active years in television, most poignantly as one of the "rejuvenated" senior citizens in the 1962 Twilight Zone episode "Kick the Can."

Trivia: Bald-pated, raspy-voiced stage and vaudeville comedian James C. Morton came to films in 1930. Working almost exclusively in short subjects, Morton spent the better part of his movie career with the Hal Roach and Columbia comedy units. He provided support for such two-reel funsters as Laurel and Hardy, the Three Stooges, Andy Clyde, Charley Chase, ZaSu Pitts, Thelma Todd, Patsy Kelly, Leon Erroll, and Our Gang. His film roles ran the gamut from bartenders to high-ranking military officers; he was frequently decked out with a lavish toupee, which inevitably ended up on the floor in a mangled heap. He was at his best as the cunning woodchopper who talks bandits Laurel and Hardy out of their money in The Devil's Brother (1933); as Paul Pain, "the heartthrob of millions," in Three Stooges' A Pain in the Pullman (1936), and frontier sharpster Quackenbush in Gene Autry's Public Cowboy No. One (1937), one of his handful of Western-feature assignments. Reportedly, James C. Morton served as director of the 1918 film A Daughter of Uncle Sam.

Trivia: A veteran of vaudeville from the age of seven, Canadian-born starlet Phyllis Crane (née Phyllis Francis) signed with Columbia Pictures in 1934. Mainly seen in bit parts as chorus girls and maids in the studio's mainstream fare, the brunette Crane was much better served by the busy short subject department. As one of the scores of pretty girls used as foils for the unit's slapstick comics, Crane appeared in most of the early Three Stooges comedies, from Men in Black (1934) to A Pain in the Pullman (1936). Providing a bit of cheesecake to the anarchic proceedings Crane in effect served the same purpose as the later and much more appreciated Christine McIntyre. But while fellow Stooge starlet Lucille Ball went on to bigger and better things, Crane continued to toil in the rough-and-tumble shorts department. She left films for good in 1937.

Trivia: A true Hollywood professional, comic bit part player and stunt performer Al Thompson seems to have worked with every purveyor of physical humor, from Larry Semon in the silent era to the Three Stooges in the 1950s. The versatile Thompson stood in for Semon in some of that slapstick comic's more impossible stunts and was later one of The Sons of the Desert (1933) opposite Laurel & Hardy. Thompson signed with the Columbia Pictures short subject department in the mid-'30s as a stunt double for veteran comedian Andy Clyde. He was soon doubling for and playing bit parts opposite all the department's funnymen and -women, all for the reported sum of 55 dollars a day. Thompson made himself look enough like Clyde to be convincing as the hayseed comedian's twin brother in Trouble Finds Andy Clyde (1939) and with a bit of makeup, could pass for either Larry Fine or Moe Howard in long shots. He continued to appear opposite Clyde and the Stooges well into the 1950s, if not always in new scenes then via stock footage, a Columbia cost-cutting specialty. Thompson's final credited appearance came in the last Andy Clyde two-reeler Pardon My Nightshirt (1956).

Trivia: A former circus and vaudeville performer, American comic actor Charles Dorety enjoyed some success as a Chaplin-imitator for the Fox Sunshine Comedies in the late 1910s. He also worked for other also-ran comedy producers such as Bull's Eye, L-KO, Universal's Rainbow and Century Comedies, and appeared opposite Gene "Fatty" Laymon in a series of two-reel Two Star Comedies produced in the mid-'20s by Mack Sennett. In a screen career that lasted until 1955, Dorety worked with almost all the reigning comedy teams, from Laurel and Hardy (The Hoose-Gow [1929]) to the Three Stooges to Abbott and Costello. With the last, he was one of the title "Kops" in Abbott and Costello Meet the Keystone Kops (1955), despite the fact that he was never a member of the original Sennett corps. Rather appropriately, this nostalgic comedy was to be Dorety's final film.

Trivia: Together with his older brother Fred Burns, Robert Burns (aka Bob Burns and Robert E. Burns) became one of the busiest bit players/stunt performers in B-Western history, easily recognizable by his trademark mustache and straightforward demeanor. Burns entered films in the 1910s, when he starred in a series of two-reelers from Vitagraph. He was still starring in two-reelers by 1920 but now for small-scale independent producers, and sometimes in the early 1920s, a low-budget concern attempted to turn him into a feature Western star as well. With character actor Horace B. Carpenter handling the directional chores and brunette Dorothy Donald playing the leading ladies, the Burns Westerns never sold as a series but were distributed by various minor organizations throughout the decade. Just Traveling (released 1927) has survived and proves Burns to be a very acceptable Western hero who may even have made the bigtime had he been given half the chance. But the Burns series was too low-budget and disappeared in the glut of low-budget Westerns released in the mid-1920s. Even busier in sound films and often cast along with brother Fred and son Forrest, Burns continued to appear in B-Westerns and serials -- literally hundreds of them -- often cast as stage drivers, townsmen, deputies, members of the posse, or non-speaking henchmen. He should of course not be confused with silent-screen comic Bobby Burns (1878-1966) or Paramount rustic Bob "Bazooka" Burns (1890-1956).

Trivia: A dignified-looking young character actor, Lynton Brent began his career on the stage, appearing in plays such as The Student Prince, Paid in Full, and as Laertes in Hamlet before entering films in 1930. Handsome enough in an average kind of way, Brent played such supporting roles as reporters (King Kong [1933]), radio operators (Streamline Express [1935]), and again Laertes, in the play-within-the-film I'll Love You Always ([1935], Garbo's interpreter Sven Hugo Borg was Hamlet!). Today, however, Brent is mainly remembered for his many roles in Columbia short subjects opposite the Three Stooges. His dignity always in shambles by the denouement, Brent was a welcome addition to the stock company, which at the time also included such comparative (and battle scarred) veterans as Bud Jamison and Vernon Dent. Leaving the short subject department in the early '40s, Brent played everyone from henchmen to lawmen in scores of B-Westerns and action melodramas, more often than not unbilled. He worked well into the television era, retiring in the late '60s. Offscreen, Brent was an accomplished architect and painter.

Trivia: A dark-haired actress from San Diego and the wife of silent screen director Edward J. LeSaint, Stella LeSaint was a popular ingenue in the mid-1910s under her real name of Stella Razetto. After starring in a dozen or so melodramas directed by her husband from 1915 to 1917, she left films in favor of the stage but was back to play innumerable unbilled bit parts in films from 1935 to 1948. She was widowed in 1940.