“Thanks to a lively, affectionate writer, we can glimpse the great clowns at work.” ― The Dallas Morning News “[Louvish] has researched his subjects thoroughly. . . . A useful reference book and a solid overview of their careers.” ― The New York Times “A fan's gleeful . . . double take on the beloved bumblers of silent and talking picture fame, seeing their prodigious pile of slapstick misadventures as high art . . . Louvish's wide-eyed love for his subjects' simple, forthright, and hardworking desire to please will bring down the house.” ― Kirkus Reviews (starred) “Lovingly researched.” ― New York Daily News “Louvish has digested films, reviews, and interviews with those who knew the pair to... create fully realized human beings.” ― Library Journal (starred) “Brims with affection and still preserves an honest, unbiased view .... a fully rounded, well-paced portrait.” ― Publishers Weekly From the Inside Flap "Thanks to a lively, affectionate writer, we can glimpse the great clowns at work." - The Dallas Morning News Praise for Stan and Ollie: The Roots of Comedy: The Double Life of Laurel and Hardy "[Louvish] has researched his subjects thoroughly. . . . A useful reference book and a solid overview of their careers." --- The New York Times "A fan's gleeful . . . double take on the beloved bumblers of silent and talking picture fame, seeing their prodigious pile of slapstick misadventures as high art . . . Louvish's wide-eyed love for his subjects' simple, forthright, and hardworking desire to please will bring down the house." --- Kirkus Reviews (starred) "Lovingly researched." --- New York Daily News From 1927 to the present day Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy have remained the screen's most famous and beloved comedy double act. Until now, there has never been a definitive biography of the duo, from birth to death. Simon Louvish traces their early lives, and the minstrel and variety theatre that influenced their later work. Their inspired casting in Duck Soup teamed them until their last days. Both often married, they found balancing their personal and professional lives nearly impossible. Their Hal Roach and MGM films were brilliant, but their move in 1941 to Twentieth Century Fox proved disastrous. In spite of this, Laurel and Hardy survived as exemplars of lasting genius, and are significant to this day. Simon Louvish has seamlessly woven tireless and thorough research into an authoritative biography of these two important and influential Hollywood pioneers. "Thanks to a lively, affectionate writer, we can glimpse the great clowns at work." - The Dallas Morning News Praise for Stan and Ollie: The Roots of Comedy: The Double Life of Laurel and Hardy "[Louvish] has researched his subjects thoroughly. . . . A useful reference book and a solid overview of their careers." --- The New York Times "A fan's gleeful . . . double take on the beloved bumblers of silent and talking picture fame, seeing their prodigious pile of slapstick misadventures as high art . . . Louvish's wide-eyed love for his subjects' simple, forthright, and hardworking desire to please will bring down the house." --- Kirkus Reviews (starred)"Lovingly researched." --- New York Daily News From 1927 to the present day Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy have remained the screen's most famous and beloved comedy double act. Until now, there has never been a definitive biography of the duo, from birth to death. Simon Louvish traces their early lives, and the minstrel and variety theatre that influenced their later work. Their inspired casting in Duck Soup teamed them until their last days. Both often married, they found balancing their personal and professional lives nearly impossible. Their Hal Roach and MGM films were brilliant, but their move in 1941 to Twentieth Century Fox proved disastrous.In spite of this, Laurel and Hardy survived as exemplars of lasting genius, and are significant to this day. Simon Louvish has seamlessly woven tireless and thorough research into an authoritative biography of these two important and influential Hollywood pioneers. Simon Louvish is the author of the acclaimed biography of W.C. Fields, The Man on the Flying Trapeze . He is also the author of novels including The Days of Miracles and Wonders .xa0He teaches at the London International Film School. Read more
Features & Highlights
Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy have remained, from 1927 to the present day, the screen's most famous and popular comedy double act, celebrated by legions of fans. But despite many books about their films and individual lives, there has never been a fully researched, definitive narrative biography of the duo, from birth to death. Louvish traces the early lives of Stanley Jefferson and Norvell Hardy and the surrounding minstrel and variety theatre, which influenced all of their later work. Louvish examines the rarely seen solo films of both our heroes, prior to their serendipitous pairing in 1927, in the long-lost short "Duck Soup." The inspired casting teamed them until their last days. Both often married, they found balancing their personal and professional lives a nearly impossible feat. Between 1927 and 1938, they were able to successfully bridge the gap between silent and sound films, which tripped up most of their prominent colleagues. Their Hal Roach and MGM films were brilliant, but their move in 1941, to Twentieth Century Fox proved disastrous, with the nine films made there ranking as some of the most embarrassing moments of cinematic history.In spite of this, Laurel and Hardy survived as exemplars of lasting genius, and their influence is seen to this day. The clowns were elusive behind their masks, but now Simon Louvish can finally reveal their full and complex humanity, and their passionate devotion to their art. In
Stan and Ollie: The Roots of Comedy: The Double Life of Laurel and Hardy
, Louvish has seamlessly woven tireless and thorough research into an authoritative biography of these two important and influential Hollywood pioneers.
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Most Helpful Reviews
★★★★★
5.0
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"A nice mess" for L&H fans
After devouring the ten-disc "Essential Collection" DVD set, the liner notes of the films in it prompted me to dig deeper into the lives of my all-time favorite funny men. Although some of the reviews for Simon Louvish's long and sometimes overly-detailed bio put me off a bit, I bit the bullet and ordered a copy. I just finished it last night and am so glad I went with this book. The author spends a lot of time tracing the roots of comedy but, at the same time, he also traces the slow but steady development of the finished Stan and Ollie characters we all came to know and love. The double lives in the title refers to their tumultuous and sometimes totally bizarre private lives vs their on-screen characterizations. Some parts take a little patience to get through but it's all worth it as everything gets tied up as you go along. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and have a much deeper appreciation for the boys, especially considering all the stuff going on behind the scenes. I've loved these two for sixty years and I'd definitely recommend it to anyone who shares that affliction...err, affection.
24 people found this helpful
★★★★★
3.0
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I'm a Laurel and Hardy fan, but....
...whoosh, the style of this book is turgid and overstuffed with mixed metaphors (on the order of "They were the conduit for blossoms of comedy which were to explode in fiery mirth."), and there's far too much "Babe had terrible trouble, which will be explained in due course." I did like the subject, but the book was really irritating to read because of the style.
10 people found this helpful
★★★★★
5.0
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Essential Reading for Laurel and Hardy Fans
This is a good book for fans of Laurel and Hardy. There is a lot of information about the boys’ lives and good information of their film history.
It is not without its drawbacks. The story concentrates too much on their on their lives before they achieved fame in the heyday of the Hal Roach years of 1929 - 1934. While it contains individual discussions of their individual films, that discussion is cursory, brief and hurried. The account discusses the recurring cast members like James Findlayson and Mae Busch. While I realize this is a book about Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, those discussions could have been fuller.
The plus side is in its account of their “double life,” alluded to in the subtitle. The private lives of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy were apparently a mess. Anyone with only a passing familiarity of their comedy films will know that on the screen at least the spouses of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy were portrayed as, charitably stated, shrews. Annoying, nagging, troublesome women. There was, unfortunately, some correlation in their real lives to their real spouses. Both were married multiple times. One of Stan’s wives couldn’t care less that he was a great comedian. He was even accused of bigamy. The wives of both were involved with substance abuse, trips to rehab sanitariums, — there was always a great deal of personal drama at home. The book provides newspaper accounts of their domestic troubles. The author has really done his homework. What better way for Stan and Oliver to channel their personal frustrations by ridiculing their wives on the screen!
In summary, this is recommended for Stan and Oli fans.
9 people found this helpful
★★★★★
5.0
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"Hats Off"
How does one do justice to two of the greatest comedy legends to have ever have graced the screen? A daunting task, but one that Simon Louvish (biographer of W.C. Fields and the Marx Brothers) accomplishes with great aplomb and thoroughness. "Stan and Ollie" covers all bases as it explores the individual lives of the duo and the eventual pairing of two great screen comedians.
Louvish begins by examining the respective early life of Stanley Jefferson and Oliver Norvell Hardy. Born and raised in England, Stanley Jefferson was the son of a theatre owner and performer, whose children were destined for the stage. But his namesake would take his father's love of acting much farther than the stage and onto screen, a journey that took him half-way around the world to California at the dawn of the movie era. Meanwhile, in small town Georgia, Oliver Norvell Hardy was born, months after his father's death, raised by a mother who ran boarding houses, her perpetually chubby son a constant watcher of the guests. His love of movies hit its stride when he ran projections for the local movie house and decided to test his fortunes on the screen.
Each comic tried to make it on his own - Louvish devotes the first half of his biography to their early lives and the movies they made before they became a popular duo. Stanley's rise was perhaps a bit more difficult due to his theatre training (and his being pegged to impersonate his former roommate, Charlie Chaplin). "Babe" Hardy took easily to the ways of the screen, despite his bulk that haunted him his entire life, which was counteracted by a grace and ease that seemd contradictory to his size. These two very separate beginnings were inevitably paired up in Hollywood at the Hal Roach studio, where these vaudevillan trained actors somewhat reluctantly became Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, a disparate image of perfectly paired clowns.
Louvish traces the years and the films that Laurel and Hardy made together with Roach, intermingling the myriad marriage and divorce affairs that plagued each man, weaving in history of supporting players and screen moments as their story unfolds. He debunks some of the stories that have floated about these two, all the while recognizing that memory is not the strongest recorder of events years after the fact. The subtitle "The Double Life of Laurel and Hardy" refers not to any lurid details, but to the men behind the faces on the screen. Laurel and Hardy were screen personas, not the men who lived and breathed off-screen; while their real lives were sometimes mirrored by what they chose to enact, clowns cannot be funny all the time. Louvish does an admirable job of weaving the good with the bad, the tremendous success while at the pinnacle of their careers, and the sad, dwindling end that included forgettable movies and studio disputes.
"Stan and Ollie", while long and a sometimes wandering read, is a wonderful portrait of two men who were friends until the very end. It is amazing to consider their output of film, and to lament what has forever been lost of their early days and solo work. Louvish truly loves Laurel and Hardy but is able to paint them in an unbiased light, moles and all, revealing the minds behind two comedic geniuses who made it big for not being the brightest bulbs in the story. This book will make fans fall in love with Laurel and Hardy all over again.
9 people found this helpful
★★★★★
4.0
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The Height of Comedy
Laurel and Hardy were the yin and yang of comedians. Thrown together at the Hal Roach studios, they were one of (if not the) greatest comedy teams of all-time. Their message was very consistent over the years. They understood their ceiling in life, yet held their friendship sacred over every circumstance. This formula worked for them, no matter what plot contrivance they were confronted with.
They achieved wild popularity in the United States, and perhaps even bigger popularity in Europe.
One reason for their greatness is that they honed their craft in literally hundreds of films in the early days of film. Early studios did not demand a pedigree from acting school, or a resume, an actor only needed to show up to get work. It was this that allowed early actors to find their screen personas, and Laurel and Hardy almost instantly melded.
Moviegoers of the 30's and 40's took to the pair, and their films were legendary. Television was not available, and reruns were rarely shown, so audiences literally craved upcoming films.
This book traces their early years, in Georgia and England, respectively, and moves to their filmography, analyzing each plot and performance. Their personal life was a little sad, Stan having a weakness with women, taking four wives, and remarrying a couple of them, one twice.
Oliver battled weight, had a marginal self-image, and believed himself hindered by a lack of education. The two held a special, life-long friendship.
Simon Louvish has picked some wonderful subjects to write about. Among them, Mae West, the Keystone Cops and WC Fields. In this book, as well as the others, Louvish does exhaustive research on the films, and takes the time to envelope the subjects psyches.
He also makes some salient observations at many times, such as his statement that pity was an emotion Laurel and Hardy put out on the screen for us to laugh at, and that this is no longer tolerated by audiences of this age.
However, Louvish's writing can be methodical, and he tames what should be a raucous and hilarious subject by being a little too dry and analyical. This could have been a joyous book celebrating two geniuses of comedy, while still telling us of their personal foibles.
4 people found this helpful
★★★★★
5.0
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Our boys, in a different light
When I first began to read Simon Louvish's book about "our boys," I found the style a little awkward and strange. But after a chapter or so, it started to go more smoothly. This was the comedy team I had read about before -- the greatest movie comedy duo, in my opinion.
Louvish writes at a chatty gallop which I suspect sounds a little different to an American at first because he is English. But once you've tuned your -- well, inner ear -- to it, his prose becomes quite captivating. Here is the slim, soft-spoken north of England comic who lived, breathed, ate and slept in terms of gags and bits of business. There is the rotund, musical, amazingly graceful Georgian who was such a consummate actor, made his comedy look easy, and left it all at the office when he went home, so that he could be an amateur chef, Hollywood's finest golfer, and a ballroom dancer par excellence. Their personalities were as different as their physical appearance -- but they fit together without a seam when it came to making comedy.
Why did Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy form a superb whole out of two disparate halves? Louvish tells us how they never had a serious quarrel -- although Laurel, the creative one, had plenty of them with their boss, studio head Hal Roach. He describes how Hardy took no offense when Laurel was paid considerably more than he -- after all, Stan Laurel spent untold hours on gag creation, being the "director behind the director," cutting the final product, and so forth, while Oliver Hardy did virtually all his work before the camera. They got along swimmingly at work -- but seldom socialized until their later years after their movie careers were over.
Louvish also discusses an aspect of their movies that many fans are not aware of: How Laurel and director Leo McCarey deliberately put elements into a number of their stories that suggested a homoerotic relationship -- without anything ever being overt, either through word or deed. As funny as the team is, and none were funnier, including the Marx Brothers, when you become aware of this homoerotic suggestion, and learn to look for it, there are scenes that can make you uncomfortable.
By the way, in real life no one ever suggested that either Stan Laurel or Oliver Hardy was anything but enthusiastically heterosexual. Laurel was married to four different women; Hardy to three.
This is a superior double biography, written in a unique, very recognizable style by a man who has specialized in the lives of great comedy kings.
3 people found this helpful
★★★★★
4.0
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Good
The book does such a good job of painting the men's portraits that the very oddity of the famous comedians as real people soon dissipates. After all, few people- outside of fans, would guess that Laurel, born Stanley Jefferson, was an Englishman who toured with Charlie Chaplin in Fred Karno's music hall revues (the British equivalent of Vaudeville), and that his father was a famed theater manager and lowbrow playwright. Louvish does a good job of contrasting Laurel's selfless written accounts of his days abroad with Karno with Chaplin's self-aggrandizing accounts. Nor would they know that Hardy was a Southerner, from Georgia, whose father (whom he never knew, due to early death), was a Civil War hero in his local town, wounded in the Battle Of Antietam. Louvish also notes that, like Judy Garland, the duo have been hailed, since their deaths (Hardy in 1957, Laurel in 1965) as gay heroes for what is seen as thinly veiled homosexual references throughout their work.
Louvish details the two men's friendship, even as Hardy was almost always making far less than Laurel, due in part to their signing separate contracts. The pair made about 440 films between them (together and separately), with Hardy making far more films alone than Laurel; yet most have not survived. He also debunks some myths about the men, most notably Hardy's claims about his past, such as the fact that he never starred in a traveling minstrel show across Dixie. Yet, along with who was the straight man, Louvish, like many other biographers, cannot pin down when and why Stanley Jefferson ever became Stan Laurel, and resorts to merely reiterating disproven prior claims.
Louvish does, importantly distinguish between several of the `firsts' in the duo's history, aside from the manifest first pairing of the team, as a team, in the 1926 Hal Roach silent film, 45 Minutes From Hollywood. However, the first officially billed film, with `Laurel And Hardy' as a team was 1927's The Second Hundred Years. To show how well researched the book is, though, Louvish goes even further, and nails the first film that both men ever appeared in, although not as a team, was 1921's The Lucky Dog. Louvish also pins the fortuitous comic pairing on director Leo McCarey, not Roach, as widely believed. He also is wise to discern that Oliver Hardy's filmic persona in the duo took longer to develop than Stan Laurel's. While Laurel went through phases as a Chaplin imitator- ala Billy West, and a pale echo of Harold Lloyd's go-getter persona, once he was paired with Hardy, his sob-happy schlemiel was pretty well set. Hardy, on the other hand, went from being the bullying villain to West, ala Chaplin's early tormentor Eric Campbell, through a series of bumbling fat men personae that never quite meshed. Even after pairing with Laurel, it took a dozen or more films for the iconic `This is another fine mess' slow boil Hardy to appear.
Yet, the minuses in this book are far outweighed by the major pluses, and Stan And Ollie, The Roots Of Comedy, The Double Life Of Laurel And Hardy is- if not the definitive work on the pair, certainly the best yet. And, as for who was the straight man, my money says it was Laurel, since Hardy seemed to suffer far more physical abuse, even though the laugh quotient was split equally. If you disagree, read the book, and you just may be right. Sort of like Laurel, or Hardy, always were about each other.
3 people found this helpful
★★★★★
4.0
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Laurel and Hardy Biography Beyond Double Talk
The title of my review, "Laurel and Hardy Beyond Double Talk" makes as much sense as Mr. Louvish's title. With that stated, I must declare that for the most part, I found his book quite educational and enjoyable. Some other reviewers issued complaints about it being too ponderous, or hard to follow. I found no basis for such criticism. In fact, I found the book challenging from the standpoint that its thoroughness kept me motivated in wanting to keep absorbing more and more information and details about these two comic masters.
It was sad to learn that there was so much unhappiness in their domestic lives. I had heard that rumor before, but Mr. Louvish documents the apparently awful experiences in their numerous respective marriages. Still, I was more interested in what was said about the two men as artists. For example, it fascinated me to learn that both Laurel and especially Hardy had made dozens and dozens of films years before they even met. It was also revealing to learn what a perfectionist Stan Laurel was in creating gags, and striving to improve his art while appearing seemingly non-artistic in the process. With the great Chaplin, for example, one is laughing at his fine comedy, but constantly aware that he is showing you art!
I think the narrated details in Stanley Jefferson, aka Laurel's years as a stage comic in England was difficult to track at times in this book. In defense of the author, it was probably hard to reconstruct much of that portion of the man's career. Having not read any of the other previous biographes of L & H, I cannot say whether or not this is comparatively a greater biography or not. I only know that I walked away knowing more about the team after completing my reading of the book.
Yes, I recommend this "Stan and Ollie" the book to anyone today wanting to learn more about this comedy team. Laurel and Hardy have stood the test of time and in my opinion, are simply the greatest comedy on film. I say this knowing that I also love the Marx Brothers, Three Stooges,Abbott and Costello and Hope and Crosby. Comedy purists keep in mind I am not counting Laurel and Hardy's movies after after "Saps at Sea!"
This book spurs a clear interest in their work. Unfortunately, many of their films are simply not available to see. Why this is the case is beyond me. We have umpteen zillion copies of "Friends," Adam Sandler, and Jack Black staring back at us on the DVD shelves, but not many Laurel and Hardy films. I hope Mr. Louvish's book will help stir up more interest in the team, so that pressure increases from fans demanding the retailing of more L & H films on DVD. Everyone is so divided on this side, or that side today, that it would be refreshing for all of us to see comic films that appeal to humanity in general. Laurel and Hardy literally made the world laugh.
3 people found this helpful
★★★★★
1.0
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Boring book
I am surprised to find the book being so boring.
2 people found this helpful
★★★★★
3.0
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Laurel and Hardy did spend leisure time and holidays together
Louvish claimed that Stan and Babe never spent any of their leisure time together. That is a great and chief flaw of this otherwise informative book. Stan's daughter Lois Laurel Brooks-Hawes in interviews going back to the 1980s on UK T.V. talk shows said her father and she and her stepmothers and Mr.Hardy and his wives spent holidays together. Her dad had a boat and would invite Mr. Hardy and his wife to go fishing with them and her Uncle Babe had a pool at his house and they would go swimming at Mr.Hardy's pool.They were much more like family then Simon Louvish would have us believe.
