Laurel and Hardy, U.S. film comedians. Stan Laurel (orig. Arthur Stanley Jefferson; b. June 16, 1890, Lancashire, Eng.—d. Feb. 23, 1965, Santa Monica, Calif., U.S.) performed in circuses and vaudeville before settling in the U.S. (1910), where he began appearing in silent movies. Oliver Hardy (orig. Norvell Hardy; b. Jan. 18, 1892, Harlem, Ga., U.S.—d. Aug. 7, 1957, North Hollywood, Calif.) managed a movie house and acted in silent comedy films from 1913. They joined Hal Roach’s studio in 1926 and began performing together in early short films such as Putting Pants on Philip (1927). They made more than 100 comedies, including Leave ’em Laughing (1928), The Music Box (1932), Sons of the Desert (1933), and Way Out West (1937), and are considered Hollywood’s first great comedy team. The skinny Laurel played the bumbling and innocent foil to the heavy, pompous Hardy as they converted simple, everyday situations into disastrous tangles of stupidity.
Laurel and Hardy summary
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acting Summary
Acting, the performing art in which movement, gesture, and intonation are used to realize a fictional character for the stage, for motion pictures, or for television. (Read Lee Strasberg’s 1959 Britannica essay on acting.) Acting is generally agreed to be a matter less of mimicry, exhibitionism, or
comedy Summary
Comedy, type of drama or other art form the chief object of which, according to modern notions, is to amuse. It is contrasted on the one hand with tragedy and on the other with farce, burlesque, and other forms of humorous amusement. The classic conception of comedy, which began with Aristotle in
film Summary
Film, series of still photographs on film, projected in rapid succession onto a screen by means of light. Because of the optical phenomenon known as persistence of vision, this gives the illusion of actual, smooth, and continuous movement. A popular form of mass media, film is a remarkably