Stan Laurel

Fun Facts:

Stan’s famous hairstyle was created by accident. He and Oliver Hardy had shaved their heads to play convicts in The Second 100 Years (1927). His hair grew back very unevenly and refused to stay down. Others on the Roach lot laughed, so Stan began to cultivate the new look. Offscreen, he combed it straight back, as did Hardy.   He always thought that his “whining face” was humiliating. The public loved it, so the producers forced him to do it in most of his movies.  Stan removed the heels from his shoes while filming. It helped him accent his already humorous walk.

Abbott and Costello weren’t getting what they wanted from the scriptwriters at Universal so would take the scripts to Stan for the three of them to work on together. Laurel first appeared with his future partner, Oliver Hardy, in The Lucky Dog (1921), which was filmed in 1919 and released in 1921. He is often thought of as being very short and skinny. He was actually around normal height (about 5′ 8″) and weight. Next to his partner, Oliver Hardy, who was about six feet tall and nearly double Stan’s body weight, Stan appeared to be rather short and skinny by comparison.When Stan’s daughter, Lois, was little, she hated Oliver Hardy because she always saw him bullying her father in their films. It persuaded Stan to incorporate a revenge scene in One Good Turn (1931).

His first wife was Lois Neilson, whom he married on 13 August 1926. Together they had a daughter, Lois, who was born on 10 December 1927. Their second child, Stanley, was born two months premature in May 1930; he died nine days later. Laurel and Neilson divorced in December 1934. Their daughter Lois died on 27 July 2017 aged 89.  In 1935, Laurel married Virginia Ruth Rogers (known as Ruth). In 1937, he filed for divorce, confessing that he was not over his ex-wife Lois, but Lois decided against a reconciliation.  On New Year’s Day 1938, Laurel married Vera Ivanova Shuvalova (known as Illeana); Ruth accused him of bigamy, but their divorce had been finalised a couple of days before his new marriage. The new marriage was very volatile, and Illeana accused him of trying to bury her alive in the back yard of their San Fernando Valley home.   He and Illeana separated in 1939 and divorced in 1940, with Illeana surrendering all claim to the Laurel surname on 1 February 1940 in exchange for $6,500.  In 1941, Laurel remarried Virginia Ruth Rogers; they were divorced for the second time in early 1946. On 6 May 1946, he married Ida Kitaeva Raphael to whom he remained married until his death. Stan co-owns the Guinness Book of World Records record for most marriages to the same person.