Trivia: See "Three Stooges"

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: 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: British stage actor and producer Wilson Benge inaugurated his Hollywood career in 1922. From 1925's Lady Windemere's Fan onward, the slight, balding Benge was typecast in butler and valet roles. He played Ronald Colman's faithful retainer Denny in 1929's Bulldog Drummond, performed virtually the same function for Colman as Barraclough the valet in Raffles (1930), and portrayed Brassett in the 1931 version of Charley's Aunt, among many others. His "domestic" career extended to such two-reelers as Laurel and Hardy's Scram (1932). One of Benge's few non-servant roles was supposed murder victim Guy Davies in the 1945 Sherlock Holmes entry The House of Fear. He remained active in films until 1951, essaying still another manservant role in Royal Wedding (1951). Wilson Benge was married to actress Sarah L. Benge, who preceded him in death by one year.

Trivia: Her pompous Grande Dame ego constantly deflated by having a pie hurled in her face, brunette American comedy actress Symona Boniface became for the Three Stooges what Margaret Dumont was for the Marx Brothers. Surprisingly, Boniface had been a noted stage actress and playwright before the 1929 stock market crash wiped her out financially. Moving to Hollywood, she toiled in anonymity doing bit parts and extra work until signing a stock contract with Columbia Pictures in 1935. A major addition to the studio's thriving short subject department, Boniface popped up in two-reelers all over the place but is today mostly associated with the Stooges, who regularly flattened her haughty demeanor. The quintessential Boniface characters were the snobbish Mrs. Van Bustle of Crash Goes the Hash (1944) and the conceited dowager Mrs. Smythe-Smythe in 1947's Half-Wits Holiday, the latter featuring her being furiously pelted with pies dropped from the ceiling. A talented but much overlooked part of the Stooges legacy, Symona Boniface died less than three years later at the Motion Picture Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, CA, but continued, eerily, to figure prominently in Stooges shorts through the middle of the decade due to the generous doses of stock footage added to keep mounting costs down.

Trivia: Like most African-American performers of his generation, comic actor Dudley Dickerson played more than his fair share of Pullman porters, bell-boys, waiters, and shoe-shine boys. But from the late '30s until the mid-'50s, Dickerson was the most prominent black actor working in two-reel comedies. Contracted by Columbia's short subject department, the roly-poly supporting comic brought a refreshing energy to his portrayals of, yes, Pullman porters, shoe-shine boys, and the always demeaning "frightened Negro domestic." Closer in type to Mantan Moreland than Stepin Fetchit, Dickerson was especially good opposite Charley Chase in His Bridal Fright (1940) and the Three Stooges in A-Plumbing We Will Go (1940). Dickerson played a Pullman porter once again in his final film The Alligator People (1959), after which he concentrated on television work. The veteran comic died of cerebral thrombosis.

Trivia: The faces of most movie extras are unmemorable blurs in the public's memory. Not so the elegant, statuesque Bess Flowers, who was crowned by appreciative film buffs as "Queen of the Hollywood Dress Extras." After studying drama (against her father's wishes) at the Carnegie Inst of Technology, Flowers intended to head to New York, but at the last moment opted for Hollywood. She made her first film in 1922, subsequently appearing prominently in such productions as Hollywood (1922) and Chaplin's Woman of Paris (1923). Too tall for most leading men, Flowers found her true niche as a supporting actress. By the time talkies came around, Flowers was mostly playing bits in features, though her roles were more sizeable in two-reel comedies; she was a special favorite of popular short-subject star Charley Chase. Major directors like Frank Lloyd always found work for Flowers because of her elegant bearing and her luminescent gift for making the people around her look good. While generally an extra, Flowers enjoyed substantial roles in such films as Frank Capra's It Happened One Night (1934), Gregory La Cava's Private Worlds and Leo McCarey's The Awful Truth (1937). In 1947's Song of the Thin Man, the usually unheralded Flowers was afforded screen billing. Her fans particularly cherish Flowers' bit as a well-wisher in All About Eve (1950), in which she breaks her customary screen silence to utter "I'm so happy for you, Eve." Flowers was married twice, first to Cecil B. DeMille's legendary "right hand man" Cullen Tate, then to Columbia studio manager William S. Holman. After her retirement, Bess Flowers made one last on-camera appearance in 1974 when she was interviewed by NBC's Tom Snyder.

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: Relocating from England to the U.S. in the 1920s, dapper, mustachioed Eddie Laughton worked in vaudeville until he was signed by Columbia Pictures in 1935. Laughton spent most of his time in the studio's two-reel comedies, earning his $55 per day in an exhausting variety of roles: hotel clerks, gangsters, snobbish socialites, jealous lovers, train conductors, and, sometimes, just one of the crowd. The Three Stooges, Columbia's top two-reel attraction, were so impressed by Laughton that they hired him as his straight man for their stage appearances. After toting up hundreds of credits in both shorts and features, Laughton left Columbia in 1945 to free-lance. Retiring in 1949, Eddie Laughton died of pneumonia three years later at the age of 49.

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: In show business from the age of 16, John Tyrrell spent ten years as a vaudeville headliner, playing straight man in the comedy team of Tyrrell and Mack. When vaudeville died, Tyrrell tried his luck as a single, taking acting lessons and spending two seasons in stock in Connecticut to learn the rudiments of role-playing. In 1936, he was signed to a contract by Columbia Pictures, where he remained until his death in 1949. He played bits in Columbia's A-product and juicy supporting roles in the studio's serials, horror flicks, and B-grade detective series. John Tyrrell is best known to contemporary audiences for his many appearances in Columbia's two-reel comedy product, sharing screen space with such funsters as Andy Clyde, Buster Keaton, and especially the Three Stooges.