1. Roscoe Conkling "Fatty" Arbuckle was an American silent film actor, director, and screenwriter.
59 Facts About Roscoe Arbuckle
2.
Roscoe Arbuckle started at the Selig Polyscope Company and eventually moved to Keystone Studios, where he worked with Mabel Normand and Harold Lloyd as well as with his nephew, Al St John.
3.
Roscoe Arbuckle mentored Charlie Chaplin, Monty Banks and Bob Hope, and brought vaudeville star Buster Keaton into the movie business.
4.
The third jury took the unusual step of giving Roscoe Arbuckle a written statement of apology for his treatment by the justice system.
5.
Hays lifted the ban within a year, but Roscoe Arbuckle only worked sparingly through the 1920s.
6.
Roscoe Arbuckle later worked as a film director under the pseudonym William Goodrich.
7.
Roscoe Arbuckle died in his sleep of a heart attack in 1933 at age 46, reportedly on the day that he signed a contract with Warner Bros.
8.
Roscoe Arbuckle was born on March 24,1887, in Smith Center, Kansas, one of nine children of Mary E Gordon and William Goodrich Arbuckle.
9.
Roscoe Arbuckle weighed in excess of 13 pounds at birth and his father believed that he was illegitimate, as both parents had slim builds.
10.
Consequently, he named him after Senator Roscoe Arbuckle Conkling of New York, a notorious philanderer whom he despised.
11.
Roscoe Arbuckle was nearly two when his family moved to Santa Ana, California.
12.
Roscoe Arbuckle first performed on stage with Frank Bacon's company at age 8 during their performance in Santa Ana.
13.
Roscoe Arbuckle enjoyed performing and continued on until his mother's death in 1898, when he was 11.
14.
Roscoe Arbuckle's father had always treated him harshly and now refused to support him, so he got work doing odd jobs in a hotel.
15.
Roscoe Arbuckle was in the habit of singing while he worked, and a professional singer heard him and invited him to perform in an amateur talent show.
16.
Roscoe Arbuckle sang, danced, and did some clowning around, but he did not impress the audience.
17.
Roscoe Arbuckle saw the crook emerging from the wings and somersaulted into the orchestra pit in obvious panic.
18.
In 1904, Sid Grauman invited Roscoe Arbuckle to sing in his new Unique Theater in San Francisco, beginning a long friendship between the two.
19.
Roscoe Arbuckle then joined the Pantages Theatre Group touring the West Coast and in 1906 played the Orpheum Theater in Portland, Oregon, in a vaudeville troupe organized by Leon Errol.
20.
Roscoe Arbuckle became the main act and the group took their show on tour.
21.
Roscoe Arbuckle then joined the Morosco Burbank Stock vaudeville company and went on a tour of China and Japan, returning in early 1909.
22.
Roscoe Arbuckle began his film career with the Selig Polyscope Company in July 1909 when he appeared in Ben's Kid.
23.
Roscoe Arbuckle appeared sporadically in Selig one-reelers until 1913, moved briefly to Universal Pictures, and became a star in producer-director Mack Sennett's Keystone Cops comedies.
24.
Mack Sennett, when recounting his first meeting with Roscoe Arbuckle, noted that he "skipped up the stairs as lightly as Fred Astaire" and that he "without warning went into a feather light step, clapped his hands and did a backward somersault as graceful as a girl tumbler".
25.
Roscoe Arbuckle's comedies are noted as rollicking and fast-paced, have many chase scenes, and feature sight gags.
26.
Roscoe Arbuckle was fond of the "pie in the face", a comedy cliche that has come to symbolize silent-film-era comedy itself.
27.
However, the name Fatty identifies the character that Roscoe Arbuckle portrayed on-screen, not Roscoe Arbuckle himself.
28.
When Roscoe Arbuckle portrayed a female, the character was named "Miss Fatty", as in the film Miss Fatty's Seaside Lovers.
29.
Roscoe Arbuckle died Friday, September 9,1921 from peritonitis caused by a ruptured bladder.
30.
The day after Rappe's death, Roscoe Arbuckle was arrested and arraigned on charges of murder and held without bail.
31.
Charlie Chaplin told reporters that he could not believe that Roscoe Arbuckle was guilty, having known him since they both worked at Keystone in 1914.
32.
Roscoe Arbuckle later wrote a premise for a film parodying Hart as a thief, bully and wifebeater.
33.
Roscoe Arbuckle hired as his lead defense counsel Gavin McNab, a competent local attorney.
34.
At the beginning of the trial, Roscoe Arbuckle told his estranged wife Minta Durfee that he had not harmed Rappe.
35.
Criminologist Dr Edward Heinrich testified that fingerprints on the hallway door proved that Rappe had tried to flee, but that Roscoe Arbuckle had stopped her by placing his hand over hers.
36.
Roscoe Arbuckle claimed that Rappe had told him that she felt ill and asked to lie down, and that he carried her into the bedroom and asked a few of the party guests to help treat her.
37.
Some jurors revealed that they believed Roscoe Arbuckle to be guilty, but not beyond a reasonable doubt.
38.
Norgard claimed that Roscoe Arbuckle stated that he wanted the key to play a joke on Rappe.
39.
The defense was so confident that Roscoe Arbuckle would be acquitted that they did not call him to testify, and McNab did not deliver a closing argument to the jury.
40.
However, some jurors interpreted the refusal to permit Roscoe Arbuckle to testify as a sign of guilt.
41.
Five of those minutes were spent writing a formal statement of apology to Roscoe Arbuckle for subjecting him to the ordeal, a dramatic and unusual gesture.
42.
Roscoe Arbuckle was manly throughout the case and told a straightforward story on the witness stand, which we all believed.
43.
We wish him success and hope that the American people will take the judgment of fourteen men and woman who have sat listening for thirty-one days to evidence, that Roscoe Arbuckle is entirely innocent and free from all blame.
44.
Hays requested that all showings and bookings of Roscoe Arbuckle's films be canceled, and exhibitors complied.
45.
However, Roscoe Arbuckle remained unable to secure work as an actor.
46.
In November 1923, Minta Durfee filed for divorce from Roscoe Arbuckle, charging grounds of desertion.
47.
Roscoe Arbuckle tried returning to filmmaking, but industry resistance to distributing his films continued to linger after his acquittal.
48.
Keaton attempted to help Roscoe Arbuckle by employing him for his films.
49.
Roscoe Arbuckle wrote the story for a Keaton short titled Day Dreams and allegedly directed scenes in Keaton's Sherlock Jr.
50.
Between 1924 and 1932, Roscoe Arbuckle directed a number of comedy shorts under the pseudonym for Educational Pictures that featured lesser-known comics of the day.
51.
Roscoe Arbuckle just sat in his director's chair like a dead man.
52.
Roscoe Arbuckle had been very nice and sweetly dead ever since the scandal that ruined his career.
53.
On June 21,1932, Roscoe Arbuckle married Addie Oakley Dukes McPhail in Erie, Pennsylvania.
54.
On June 28,1933, Roscoe Arbuckle had finished filming In the Dough, the last of the Vitaphone two-reelers.
55.
Many of Roscoe Arbuckle's films, including the feature The Life of the Party, survive only as worn prints with foreign-language intertitles.
56.
However, it is likely that due to the reputation Roscoe Arbuckle received around the death of Virginia Rappe, that many studios wished to avoid any negative backlash and purposely destroyed any surviving films in which he had a starring role.
57.
Roscoe Arbuckle is the subject of a 2004 novel titled I, Fatty by author Jerry Stahl.
58.
Fatty Roscoe Arbuckle's was an American-themed restaurant chain in the UK named after Roscoe Arbuckle.
59.
In Curb Your Enthusiasm's Season 12 Episode 8, "The Colostomy Bag," Larry David in discussion with Conan O'Brien claims that Roscoe Arbuckle attacked a stranger with a beer bottle after being spoken to in public.