50 Facts About WC Fields

WC Fields's comic persona was a misanthropic and hard-drinking egotist who remained a sympathetic character despite his supposed contempt for children and dogs.

WC Fields was born William Claude Dukenfield in Darby, Pennsylvania, the oldest child of a working-class family.

WC Fields's mother, Kate Spangler Felton, was a Protestant of British ancestry.

WC Fields'seducation was sporadic and did not progress beyond grade school.

WC Fields later embellished stories of his childhood, depicting himself as a runaway who lived by his wits on the streets of Philadelphia from an early age, but his home life is believed to have been reasonably happy.

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In 1904 WC Fields's father visited him for two months in England while he was performing there in music halls.

WC Fields enabled his father to retire, purchased him a summer home, and encouraged his parents and siblings to learn to read and write so they could communicate with him by letter.

WC Fields'sfamily supported his ambitions for the stage and saw him off on the train for his first stage tour.

When WC Fields played for English-speaking audiences, he found he could get more laughs by adding muttered patter and sarcastic asides to his routines.

In 1905 WC Fields made his Broadway debut in a musical comedy, The Ham Tree.

The act was a success, and WC Fields starred in the Follies from 1916 to 1922, not as a juggler but as a comedian in ensemble sketches.

In 1915, WC Fields starred in two short comedies, Pool Sharks and His Lordship's Dilemma, filmed at the French Gaumont Company's American studio in Flushing, New York.

WC Fields went immediately to Hollywood, where Schulberg teamed him with Chester Conklin for two features and loaned him and Conklin out for an Al Christie-produced remake of Tillie's Punctured Romance for Paramount release.

WC Fields wore a scruffy clip-on mustache in all of his silent films.

WC Fields wore it in his first sound film, The Golf Specialist —a two-reeler that faithfully reproduces a sketch he had introduced in 1918 in the Follies—but gave up wearing a mustache after his first sound feature film, Her Majesty, Love, his only Warner Bros.

In 1932 and 1933, WC Fields made four short subjects, distributed through Paramount Pictures, for comedy pioneer Mack Sennett.

The first of them, The Dentist, is unusual in that WC Fields portrays an entirely unsympathetic character: he cheats at golf, assaults his caddy, and treats his patients with unbridled callousness.

William K Everson says that the cruelty of this comedy made it "hardly less funny" but that "Fields must have known that The Dentist presented a serious flaw for a comedy image that was intended to endure", and Fields showed a somewhat warmer persona in his subsequent Sennett shorts.

In September 1937 WC Fields returned to Hollywood to "star" in Paramount's complicated musical variety anthology The Big Broadcast of 1938, appearing with Martha Raye, Dorothy Lamour, and Bob Hope.

WC Fields loathed working on the film and particularly detested the director, Mitchell Leisen, who felt the same way about WC Fields and thought him unfunny and difficult.

WC Fields continued personally and with legal counsel to protect his comedy material during the final decades of his career, especially with regard to that material's reuse in his films.

WC Fields married a fellow vaudevillian, chorus girl Harriet "Hattie" Hughes, on April 8,1900.

Until his death, WC Fields continued to correspond with Hattie and voluntarily sent her a weekly stipend.

WC Fields accused Hattie of turning their son against him and of demanding more money from him than he could afford.

Poole died of complications of alcoholism in October 1928, and WC Fields contributed to their son's support until he was 19 years of age.

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WC Fields met Carlotta Monti in 1933, and the two began a sporadic relationship that lasted until his death in 1946.

WC Fields was listed in the 1940 census as single and living at 2015 DeMille Drive.

On movie sets, WC Fields shot most of his scenes in varying states of inebriation.

In reality, WC Fields was somewhat indifferent to dogs, but occasionally owned one.

In 1936, WC Fields's heavy drinking precipitated a significant decline in his health.

When WC Fields would refer to McCarthy as a "woodpecker's pin-up boy" or a "termite's flophouse", Charlie would fire back at WC Fields about his drinking:.

WC Fields's renewed popularity from his radio broadcasts with Bergen and McCarthy earned him a contract with Universal Pictures in 1939, brokered by promoter-producer Lester Cowan.

WC Fields dominated the action and stole the film, winning star billing in the process.

WC Fields fought with studio producers, directors, and writers over the content of his films.

WC Fields personally recruited Universal's then-popular singing star Gloria Jean and his old cronies Leon Errol and Franklin Pangborn as his co-stars.

Director Eddie Cline filmed the rambling script as WC Fields conceived it, culminating in an incoherent string of blackout sketches.

On March 15,1941, while WC Fields was out of town, Christopher Quinn, the two-year-old son of his neighbors, actor Anthony Quinn and his wife Katherine DeMille, drowned in a lily pond on WC Fields's property.

In 1971, when WC Fields was seen as an anti-establishment figure, Dodd, Mead issued a reprint, illustrated with photographs of the author.

The scene featured a temperance meeting with society people at the home of a wealthy society matron Margaret Dumont, in which WC Fields discovers that the punch has been spiked, resulting in drunken guests and a very happy WC Fields.

In 1944, WC Fields continued to make radio guest appearances, where script memorizations were unnecessary.

Just before his death that year, WC Fields recorded a spoken-word album, including his "Temperance Lecture" and "The Day I Drank a Glass of Water", at Les Paul's studio, where Paul had installed a new multi-track recorder.

WC Fields spent the last 22 months of his life at the Las Encinas Sanatorium in Pasadena, California.

WC Fields's funeral took place on January 2,1947, in Glendale, California.

WC Fields often reproduced elements of his own family life in his films.

WC Fields hadn't laid eyes on his family in nearly twenty years, and yet the painful memories lingered.

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WC Fields often contributed to the scripts of his films under unusual pseudonyms.

WC Fields had a small cadre of supporting players that he employed in several films:.

WC Fields was enthusiastic about the role, but ultimately withdrew his name from consideration so he could devote his time to writing You Can't Cheat an Honest Man.

Best-selling biography of Fields published three years after his death, W C Fields, His Follies and Fortunes by Robert Lewis Taylor, was instrumental in popularizing the idea that Fields's real-life character matched his screen persona.

WC Fields is one of the figures that appears in the crowd scene on the cover of The Beatles' 1967 album Sgt.