Roscoe Conkling "Fatty" Arbuckle was an American silent film actor, comedian, director, and screenwriter.
61 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 one day after her hospitalization from peritonitis caused by a ruptured bladder.
30.
Roscoe Arbuckle was regarded by those who knew him closely as a good-natured man who was shy around women; he has been described as "the most chaste man in pictures".
31.
Roscoe Arbuckle later wrote a premise for a film parodying Hart as a thief, bully, and wife beater, which Keaton purchased from him.
32.
On September 17,1921, Roscoe Arbuckle was arrested and arraigned on charges of manslaughter.
33.
Roscoe Arbuckle arranged bail after nearly three weeks in jail.
34.
Roscoe Arbuckle hired as his lead defense counsel Gavin McNab, a competent local attorney.
35.
At the beginning of the trial Roscoe Arbuckle told his already-estranged wife, Minta Durfee, that he did not harm Rappe; she believed him and appeared regularly in the courtroom to support him.
36.
Roscoe Arbuckle was simple, direct, and unflustered in both direct and cross-examination.
37.
Roscoe Arbuckle then claimed Rappe told him 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.
38.
Probably assuming Rappe would simply sleep it off, Roscoe Arbuckle drove Taub into town.
39.
Roscoe Arbuckle refused to look at the exhibits or read the trial transcripts, having made up her mind in the courtroom.
40.
The defense was so convinced of an acquittal that Roscoe Arbuckle was not called to testify.
41.
However, some jurors interpreted the refusal to let Roscoe Arbuckle testify as a sign of guilt.
42.
Delmont was touring the country giving one-woman shows as, "The woman who signed the murder charge against Roscoe Arbuckle", and lecturing on the evils of Hollywood.
43.
Roscoe Arbuckle was manly throughout the case and told a straightforward story on the witness stand, which we all believed.
44.
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.
45.
Roscoe Arbuckle's organs had been destroyed and it was now impossible to test for pregnancy.
46.
Roscoe Arbuckle had requested that all showings and bookings of Arbuckle films be canceled, and exhibitors complied.
47.
However, Roscoe Arbuckle was still unable to secure work as an actor.
48.
In November 1923, Minta Durfee filed for divorce from Roscoe Arbuckle, charging grounds of desertion.
49.
Roscoe Arbuckle tried returning to filmmaking, but industry resistance to distributing his pictures continued to linger after his acquittal.
50.
Keaton attempted to help Roscoe Arbuckle by giving him work on his films.
51.
Roscoe Arbuckle wrote the story for a Keaton short called Day Dreams.
52.
Roscoe Arbuckle appeared alongside Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, and Jackie Coogan.
53.
The pun being too obvious, Roscoe Arbuckle adopted the more formal pseudonym "William Goodrich".
54.
Between 1924 and 1932, Roscoe Arbuckle directed a number of comedy shorts under the pseudonym for Educational Pictures, which featured lesser-known comics of the day.
55.
Roscoe Arbuckle just sat in his director's chair like a dead man.
56.
Roscoe Arbuckle had been very nice and sweetly dead ever since the scandal that ruined his career.
57.
On June 21,1932, Roscoe Arbuckle married Addie Oakley Dukes McPhail in Erie, Pennsylvania.
58.
On June 28,1933, Roscoe Arbuckle had finished filming the last of the two-reelers.
59.
Many of Roscoe Arbuckle's films, including the feature The Life of the Party, survive only as worn prints with foreign-language inter-titles.
60.
Roscoe Arbuckle is the subject of a 2004 novel titled I, Fatty by author Jerry Stahl.
61.
Fatty Roscoe Arbuckle's was an American-themed restaurant chain in the UK named after Roscoe Arbuckle.