W.C. Fields
Acting
Born 1880-01-29
Died 1946-12-25
Darby, Pennsylvania, USA
66 credits
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William Claude Dukenfield was the eldest of five children born to Cockney immigrant James Dukenfield and Philadelphia native Kate Felton. He went to school for four years, then quit to work with his father selling vegetables from a horse cart. At eleven, after many fights with his alcoholic father (who hit him on the head with a shovel), he ran away from home. For a while he lived in a hole in the ground, depending on stolen food and clothing. He was often beaten and spent nights in jail. His first regular job was delivering ice. By age thirteen he was a skilled pool player and juggler. It was then, at an amusement park in Norristown PA, that he was first hired as an entertainer. There he developed the technique of pretending to lose the things he was juggling. In 1893 he was employed as a juggler at Fortescue's Pier, Atlantic City. When business was slow he pretended to drown in the ocean (management thought his fake rescue would draw customers). By nineteen he was billed as "The Distinguished Comedian" and began opening bank accounts in every city he played. At age twenty-three he opened at the Palace in London and played with Sarah Bernhardt at Buckingham Palace. He starred at the Folies-Bergere (young Charles Chaplin and Maurice Chevalier were on the program).
He was in each of the Ziegfeld Follies from 1915 through 1921. He played for a year in the highly praised musical "Poppy" which opened in New York in 1923. In 1925 D.W. Griffith made a movie of the play, renamed Sally of the Sawdust (1925), starring Fields. Pool Sharks (1915), Fields' first movie, was made when he was thirty-five. He settled into a mansion near Burbank, California and made most of his thirty-seven movies for Paramount. He appeared in mostly spontaneous dialogs on Charlie McCarthy's radio shows. In 1939 he switched to Universal where he made films written mainly by and for himself. He died after several serious illnesses, including bouts of pneumonia.
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Filmography
— top 60 of 66
Acting
47 credits
Wogan
The Movie Orgy
Alice in Wonderland
David Copperfield
Vaudeville
That's Entertainment, Part II
Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?
Hollywood Out-takes and Rare Footage
Hollywood on Parade No. B-10
The Big Parade of Comedy
If I Had a Million
Follow the Boys
Song of the Open Road
You're Telling Me!
Oops, Those Hollywood Bloopers!
Tales of Manhattan
Bob Hope's World of Comedy
The Silver Screen: Color Me Lavender
Mae West and the Men Who Knew Her
Cavalcade of the Academy Awards
Down Memory Lane
Her Majesty, Love
Marlene Dietrich: Home Movies
International House
Million Dollar Legs
Going Hollywood: The '30s
Hollywood Heaven: Tragic Lives, Tragic Deaths
Hidden Hollywood II: More Treasures from the 20th Century Fox Vaults
Mississippi
Tillie and Gus
Hooray for Hollywood
Six of a Kind
Show-Business at War
Poppy
The Potters
That Royle Girl
Sensations of 1945
The Circus: Premiere
Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch
It's the Old Army Game
Sally of the Sawdust
So's Your Old Man
The Big Broadcast of 1938
Tillie's Punctured Romance
The Hollywood Clowns
Running Wild
Fools for Luck
Writing
12 credits
The Bank Dick
The Golf Specialist
Never Give a Sucker an Even Break
Man on the Flying Trapeze
My Little Chickadee
It's a Gift
You Can't Cheat an Honest Man
Pool Sharks
The Barber Shop
The Fatal Glass of Beer
The Old-Fashioned Way
The Dentist
Other credits
1 credit
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