STACK #124 Feb 2016

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Part 2

T he chance encounter they appeared together in the comedy short The Lucky Dog,

the movie capital of the South – in 1913, where Norvell found work as a labourer at the Lubin Motion Picture Company. As with all of those early non-union movie studios, their employees undertook a multitude of tasks, from scene movers to gag writers to camera operators and to appearing in front of the camera. And so it was that Hardy got his first accredited role in the film Outwitting Dad (1914), where the credits listed him as O.N. Hardy (Hardy had adopted the name Oliver as a tribute to the father he never knew). But by his next film, Casey’s Birthday , he had acquired the

between Stan Laurel and Oliver “Babe” Hardy, when

gave little indication of what would become the most famous comedy double act in movie history. In fact, it would be another seven years before Hardy met the English vaudeville comedian again on a film set.  The youngest of five children, Oliver Hardy was born Norvell Hardy in Harlem, Georgia, on the 18th of January 1892. The Hardy family were of English extraction and could

The seven-year-

old Norvell Hardy “Babe” Hardy

trace their roots back to Thomas Hardy, Lord Nelson’s Flag Captain at the Battle of Trafalgar. Norvell’s father Oliver served in the 16th Georgia Infantry Regiment during the American Civil War. Wounded at the Battle of Sharpsburg in September 1862, he was invalided out of the Confederate army but immediately enrolled again as a recruiting officer. After the war, he emerged as a local politician and Columbia County’s tax collector. But Norvell never got to know his father, for Oliver Snr. died a mere nine months after his son was born. Following the death of her husband, Emily Hardy and her children took over the management of a boarding house in Milledgeville, Georgia, which was frequented by travelling show people. It was here, whilst sitting in the lobby, that the young Norvell began to watch and study the polite genteelism of the Southern folk who inhabited the hotel. The youngster became fascinated with these people’s euphemisms and dainty mannerisms, some of which he would eventually adopt for his character of “Ollie” in the Laurel and Hardy films.  He had also inherited his father’s appetite for good old Southern home cooking, and by

the age of fourteen, his weight had ballooned to 250lbs. His mother, concerned about her son’s weight, enrolled him in the Georgia Military Academy, believing that the strict physical discipline would slim him down. But Norvell did not take kindly to a military regime and left the Academy a few months later. In 1910 he got himself a job in Midgeville’s

nickname that he would retain for the rest of his life, and the name by which he would be credited in films for the next decade:”Babe”. Apparently, as the story goes, the nickname came from a Jacksonville barber of Italian extraction, who after shaving Hardy would always rub talcum

powder into his cherubic cheeks, then pat them saying, “Nice-a babeee, nice-a

only movie theatre, as a ticket collector cum cleaner, but after the theatre manager heard Norvell singing (whilst undertaking his cleaning chores), he also paid him to sing during the evening performances. Hardy had a beautiful singing voice and began to believe that he could make a career for himself on the vaudeville circuit. However, after watching countless comedy and drama movies during his theatre tenure, he was convinced that he had as much acting talent, if not more than the many stilted performances that were projected onscreen most evenings. Now with a wife in tow, the Hardys travelled to Jacksonville, Florida – then

babeee.” His Lubin co-workers continually ragged Hardy about it and began

One of Babe Hardy’s several “Fatty” films Larry Semon, Dorothy Dwan (Semon’s wife) and Babe Hardy in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1925)

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