(W.C. Fields is a true comedy legend and remains one of th...)
W.C. Fields is a true comedy legend and remains one of the most recognizable and beloved actors of all time. From his early days on stage in vaudeville and Broadway through his live appearances on radio, he created an iconic persona that has never been matched. The comic genius of W.C. Fields is best captured forever in his body of films that highlight his notoriously sarcastic quick wit and slapstick routines. The W.C. Fields Comedy Essentials Collection features 18 of his best films that continue to leave audiences of all ages laughing out loud.
William Claude Dukenfield , better known as W. C. Fields, was an American comedian, actor, juggler and writer. Fields' comic persona was a misanthropic and hard-drinking egotist, who remained a sympathetic character despite his snarling contempt for dogs and children.
Background
He was born William Claude Dukenfield in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the first child among the three sons and two daughters of James C. Dukenfield and Kate (Felton) Dukenfield.
His father, who had come to the United States from London, England, worked as a costermonger, hawking fruit and vegetables from a horse-drawn wagon.
Education
After four years of schooling, Claude went to work with his father. But they quarreled violently, and at the age of eleven the boy ran away from home.
Career
He lived for a time above a blacksmith shop and later stayed briefly with his maternal grandmother, working at odd jobs in a pool hall, on an ice wagon, in a department store, and as a newsboy.
In 1894, Fields began his career as a carnival juggler. From an early age he had been fascinated by the art of juggling, and he devoted hours of concentrated practice to perfecting his skills. By his teens, he had become an expert juggler with a comic routine built around the artful fumble.
Dressed as a bewhiskered tramp, and with W. C. Fields as his stage name, he worked his way up from touring circus companies to a featured performer on the American vaudeville stage before he was twenty.
From 1901 to the outbreak of World War I he made several European and world tours with his juggling act and with new comic routines as a billiards player and as a golfer--routines that he recorded in his first silent movie, Pool Sharks (1915), and his first sound film, The Golf Specialist (1930).
Reconciled with his family, he took his father to England on one such tour. Fields joined the Ziegfeld Follies in 1915 and played in the famed variety show through 1921.
He spent the 1922 season in a similar show, George White's Scandals. The next year he took a starring role in the Broadway musical comedy Poppy, in a part that was to have a decisive influence on his later career.
Fields played Eustace McGargle, an old-time country-fair performer, a juggler, a mountebank peddler of nostrums, a gambling trickster adept at the shell game and at cards. This role became Fields's comic persona, both as a performer and in private life--the confidence man in a top hat, muttering caustic asides, hostile not only to pretension and sentiment but to most of society, including (or especially) children and dogs.
He repeated the role of Eustace McGargle in his first important silent movie performance in Sally of the Sawdust (1925), directed by D. W. Griffith, and in a sound version of Poppy (1936); he played similar characters in such films as Tillie and Gus (1933), The Old-Fashioned Way (1934), and You Can't Cheat an Honest Man (1939).
Except for his appearances in Earl Carroll's Vanities in 1928 and on a weekly radio program with the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen in the late 1930's, Fields devoted his career, after Sally of the Sawdust, to motion pictures. Altogether, Fields appeared in at least twelve silent and twenty-nine sound films between 1915 and 1944.
These two films and a third Fields domestic comedy, The Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935), are among the most pointed satires on family life ever made in Hollywood. He also portrayed a memorable Micawber in George Cukor's David Copperfield (1935). Fields was reputed to be as misanthropic in private life as he was on the screen.
His most famous personal foible was his suspicion of banks. With an income of more than $125, 000 per motion picture at the height of his career, Fields was said to carry huge sums of cash on his person, and he reportedly opened scores of bank accounts around the country under various false names.
Fields died of cirrhosis of the liver in a Pasadena, California, sanitarium and was buried in Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale, California.
(W.C. Fields is a true comedy legend and remains one of th...)
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Personality
His reputation as a drunk was probably exaggerated, but his capacities as a drinker were considerable. During his Hollywood years, according to Robert L. Taylor, he began drinking martinis before breakfast and consumed two quarts of gin a day.
Connections
Fields married Harriet Veronica Hughes on April 8, 1900. They had one child, a son, William Claude Fields, Jr. They separated when Fields was still playing vaudeville, although they were still legally married at the time of Fields's death.