STACK Feb Issue 124

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T he chance encounter
between Stan Laurel and
Oliver “Babe” Hardy, when
they appeared together in the
comedy short The Lucky Dog,
gave little indication of what would
become the most famous comedy
double act in movie history. In fact, it
would be another seven years
before Hardy met the
English vaudeville comedian again on
a film set.
The youngest of five children,
Oliver Hardy was born Norvell Hardy
in Harlem, Georgia, on the 18th
of January 1892. The Hardy family
were of English extraction and could
trace their roots back to Thomas Hardy, Lord
Nelson’s Flag Captain at the Battle of Trafalgar.
Norvell’s father Oliver served in the 16th Georgia
Infantry Regiment during the American Civil
War. Wounded at the Battle of Sharpsburg in
September 1862, he was invalided out of the
Confederate army but immediately enrolled again
as a recruiting officer. After the war, he emerged
as a local politician and Columbia County’s tax
collector. But Norvell never got to know his
father, for Oliver Snr. died a mere nine months
after his son was born.
Following the death of her husband,
Emily Hardy and her children took over
the management of a boarding house in
Milledgeville, Georgia, which was frequented
by travelling show people. It was here, whilst
sitting in the lobby, that the young Norvell
began to watch and study the polite genteelism
of the Southern folk who inhabited the
hotel. The youngster became fascinated
with these people’s euphemisms and dainty
mannerisms, some of which he would eventually
adopt for his character of “Ollie” in the Laurel
and Hardy films.
He had also inherited his father’s appetite
for good old Southern home cooking, and by
016
the age of fourteen, his weight had ballooned to
250lbs. His mother, concerned about her son’s
weight, enrolled him in the Georgia Military
Academy, believing that the strict physical
discipline would slim him down. But Norvell did
not take kindly to a military regime and left the
Academy a few months later.
In 1910 he got himself a job in Midgeville’s
only movie theatre, as a ticket
collector cum cleaner, but after
the theatre manager heard Norvell
singing (whilst undertaking his
cleaning chores), he also paid him
to sing during the evening
performances. Hardy had a beautiful
singing voice and began to believe
that he could make a career for
himself on the vaudeville circuit.
However, after watching countless
comedy and drama movies during his
theatre tenure, he was convinced that
he had as much acting talent, if
not more than the many stilted
performances that were projected
onscreen most evenings.
Now with a wife in tow, the Hardys
travelled to Jacksonville, Florida – then
the movie capital of the South – in
1913, where Norvell found work as a
labourer at the Lubin Motion Picture
Company. As with all of those early
non-union movie studios, their
employees undertook a multitude
of tasks, from scene movers to gag
writers to camera operators and to
appearing in front of the camera.
And so it was that Hardy got his first
accredited role in the film Outwitting
Dad (1914), where the credits listed
him as O.N. Hardy (Hardy had
adopted the name Oliver as a tribute
to the father he never knew).
But by his next film, Casey’s
Birthday, he had acquired the
nickname that he would retain for the rest of his
life, and the name by which he would be credited
in films for the next decade:”Babe”. Apparently,
as the story goes, the nickname came from a
Jacksonville barber of Italian extraction, who
after shaving Hardy would always rub talcum
powder into his cherubic cheeks, then
pat them saying, “Nice-a babeee, nice-a
babeee.” His Lubin co-workers continually
ragged Hardy about it and began
EXTRAS
One of Babe Hardy’s several “Fatty” films
Larry Semon, Dorothy Dwan (Semon’s
wife) and Babe Hardy in The Wonderful
Wizard of Oz (1925)
Part 2
The seven-year-
old Norvell Hardy
“Babe” Hardy