W.C. Fields

Known for ActingBorn 1880-01-29Died 1946-12-25Darby, Pennsylvania, USA

William Claude Dukenfield was the eldest of five children born to Cockney immigrant James Dukenfield and Philadelphia native Kate Felton. He went to school for four years, then quit to work with his father selling vegetables from a horse cart. At eleven, after many fights with his alcoholic father (who hit him on the head with a shovel), he ran away from home. For a while he lived in a hole in the ground, depending on stolen food and clothing. He was often beaten and spent nights in jail. His first regular job was delivering ice. By age thirteen he was a skilled pool player and juggler. It was then, at an amusement park in Norristown PA, that he was first hired as an entertainer. There he developed the technique of pretending to lose the things he was juggling. In 1893 he was employed as a juggler at Fortescue's Pier, Atlantic City. When business was slow he pretended to drown in the ocean (management thought his fake rescue would draw customers). By nineteen he was billed as "The Distinguished Comedian" and began opening bank accounts in every city he played. At age twenty-three he opened at the Palace in London and played with Sarah Bernhardt at Buckingham Palace. He starred at the Folies-Bergere (young Charles Chaplin and Maurice Chevalier were on the program). He was in each of the Ziegfeld Follies from 1915 through 1921. He played for a year in the highly praised musical "Poppy" which opened in New York in 1923. In 1925 D.W. Griffith made a movie of the play, renamed Sally of the Sawdust (1925), starring Fields. Pool Sharks (1915), Fields' first movie, was made when he was thirty-five. He settled into a mansion near Burbank, California and made most of his thirty-seven movies for Paramount. He appeared in mostly spontaneous dialogs on Charlie McCarthy's radio shows. In 1939 he switched to Universal where he made films written mainly by and for himself. He died after several serious illnesses, including bouts of pneumonia.Read more

Movies & web series

How to Break 90 #3: Hip Action

The Potters

Hidden Hollywood II: More Treasures from the 20th Century Fox Vaults

W.C. Fields: Straight Up

Going Hollywood: The '30s

Vaudeville

Hooray for Hollywood

Song of the Open Road

W.C. Fields: 6 Short Films

Tillie and Gus

Hollywood Out-takes and Rare Footage

The Big Parade of Comedy

That's Entertainment, Part II

The Old-Fashioned Way

Down Memory Lane

Show-Business at War

Never Give a Sucker an Even Break

Poppy

You Can't Cheat an Honest Man

The Movie Orgy

Fools for Luck

Janice Meredith

Million Dollar Legs

Mississippi

Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?

David Copperfield

So's Your Old Man

Sensations of 1945

Too Many Highballs

Her Majesty, Love

If I Had a Million

The Bank Dick

My Little Chickadee

Cavalcade of the Academy Awards

Tales of Manhattan

Oops, Those Hollywood Bloopers!

Tillie's Punctured Romance

Running Wild

The Big Broadcast of 1938

The Barber Shop

It's a Gift

You're Telling Me!

Hollywood Heaven: Tragic Lives, Tragic Deaths

Man on the Flying Trapeze

Alice in Wonderland

Sally of the Sawdust

Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch

The Fatal Glass of Beer