One of cinema's most famous comedic duos was Laurel and Hardy. Few know the two didn't team up until the late 1920's despite each having long movie careers before they were linked up forever in film lore.
Stanley Jefferson, aka Stan Laurel, made his earliest extant film, November 1918, "Just Rambling Along." A relatively newcomer to movies, Stanley had debuted in front of the camera for a demo film in late 1917 before the 28-year-old vaudeville performer was hired by Universal Picture's Carl Laemmle to play in April 1918's "Hickory Harem."
Son of an English theater manager, Stanley began as a stage pantomimist whose early claim to fame was being an understudy for young Charlie Chaplin during an American tour with The Fred Karno Troupe in 1913. Stanley Jefferson stuck around the United States after the tour and formed with two other Karno alumni "The Three Comiques," playing a Chaplin imitation. Stanley belonged to another trio act before meeting Mae Dahlberg, becoming an entertaining vaudeville couple. It was Mae who shortened Jefferson's first name to Stan. Their schtick was Mae always beating up a subserviant Stan. During a Los Angeles performance, a film producer saw their act and made a demo film seen by Laemmle and Chaplin. The former signed Stan to a Universal Pictures' movie contract in early 1918. The comedian's early screen persona was a mixed bag which really didn't solidify until he teamed up with Oliver Hardy in 1928.
Oliver Hardy had been in movies much earlier than Stan. Born Norville Hardy in Harlem, Georgia to a former Confederate soldier wounded in the Battle of Antietam, Hardy adopted his father's name Oliver as a teenager (his dad died one year after Norville was born). He worked as a Milledgeville, Georgia movie theater manager for three years before he was convinced he should be in films. Journeying to nearby Jacksonville, Florida, where the Lubin Manufacturing Company had a film studio branch there, the 21-year-older worked as a vaudeville singer in the evenings while beginning his movie career in an April 1914 debut, "Outwitting Dad." The 6-foot one-inch 300-pounder was in demand partly because his girth, earning him the nickname "Babe." His earliest surviving film is November 1914's "The Servant Girl's Legacy," the 22nd short for the Lubin Company.
By 1917 Hardy made the trip to Los Angeles, working for Vitagraph Studios. He played mostly villains during his employ with the studio, a departure from the roles he played in his early days in Jacksonville and in his later movies with Laurel.
