Oliver Hardy

Born in Harlem, Georgia, on January 18, 1892, Norvell Hardy – his real name – was the son of a Confederate soldier in the Civil War, who became a railroad foreman. He died before he was one year old, while his mother, becoming a widow, became a businesswoman, setting up a hotel. A rebellious and troubled young man, before reaching the age of majority he had run away from home to join a theater group. His mother tried to get him back on track by committing him to a rigid military college. He continued determined to succeed as an artist and ended up starting a career as a singer.

Despite the fact that he had developed a certain complex as a child, due to his obesity, he was encouraged to try to succeed in the cinema, after the success of Roscoe Arbuckle , known as Fatty, one of the stars of silent comedies. Being 1.90 meters tall and weighing 125 kilos, he was immediately typecast as a villain, first using Babe Hardy as a pseudonym. Divorced from Madelyn Saloshin, in 1920, he joined an actress, Myrtle Reeves ( A Kentucky Cinderella ), and later the script Virginia Lucille Jones, who would accompany him until his last days.

Signing for the Hal Roach production company changed his life. There he would end up paired with the British Stan Laurel , along with whom he would achieve stardom. Their first film as a comedy duo was 1927’s The Second Hundred Years , directed by Fred Guiol and supervised by Leo McCarey , who had encouraged their partnership. He had adopted Oliver as a nickname, which actually corresponded to his mother.

They benefited from minimalism, that is, they were more fun the simpler the arguments. In A Perfect Day they try to go to the country with their family, but successive misfortunes prevent them from leaving the same block. In the fifteen-minute Be Big , Hardy struggles to remove Laurel’s tiny boots, which she has slipped on by mistake.

Sometimes they repeated gags with variations, like the famous Tit-For-Tat, which consisted of destroying their enemy’s precious objects, while he watched as if he didn’t care what was happening, until at the end he took revenge, breaking something of the duo. . Impossible to forget Beau Hunks , from 1931, where Hardy is in love with Jean, whose photograph he contemplates all the time. When a letter arrives from the young woman ending the romance, Hardy decides to enlist in the Foreign Legion to forget her. There he discovers that all the legionnaires – and even the colonel – have the same photo of Jean.

In total they would film 105 titles together, being one of the few that resisted the transition from silent to sound. After their successful shorts, such as What a Pair of Sailors, Flying Elephants and An Eye for an Eye, they kept up the commercial pull with funny feature films, such as Boating , directed by James Parrott , in 1931, which was their first. They followed, among others , The Child’s Grandfather , by George Marshall and Leo McCarey, Fra Diavolo , by Hal Roach , Forced Sailors , by Gordon Douglas , Laurel and Hardy in the West , by James W. Horne.   , Fools of the air , by A. Edward Sutherland , or Partymates , by William A. Seiter .

Their decline began in the 40s, when they stopped working for Roach, putting themselves at the service of Fox and MGM, which restricted their freedom, softening their gags so that they addressed the whole family. Due to health problems of his partner, Oliver Hardy would appear alone in some title. In 1949 his friend John Wayne asked him if he wanted to act as a supporting actor in the film The Kentucky Wrestler , where he showed that he could have made a career as a dramatic actor. Shortly after , Frank Capra turned to him for a cameo in As Luck Willed , with Bing Crosby (1950).

After the last film by the duo known in Spain as El Gordo y el Flaco, Atomic Robinsons , from 1951, Laurel and Ollie recalled that years before they had triumphed with a tour of Europe. But his attempt to revalidate those years has to be suspended in the middle, as Hardy suffers a heart attack. Worried about his weight, he managed to lose 65 kilos by undergoing a strict diet. But his friends felt a little uncomfortable with him, because they didn’t quite recognize him, which causes him depression. He died on August 7, 1957, after a series of convulsive strokes.