Moe Howard

Moe Howard, Larry Fine and Curly Howard were awarded a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1560 Vine Street in Hollywood, California.

Moe Howard, the "Boss Stooge" and brother of Stooges Curly Howard and Shemp Howard, began his acting career in 1909 by playing bit roles in silent Vitagraph films. At 17 he joined a troupe working on a showboat and also appeared in several two-reel comedy shorts.

Determined to get into movies, Moe (then going by his middle name, Harry) went to the Brooklyn-based American Vitagraph studios in May 1909, and volunteered to run errands for the stars and crews without charging for the service. This impressed Maurice Costello, who brought Moe inside and introduced him to the company. He was soon appearing in dramas with Costello and comedies with John Bunny and Flora Finch. At first, he did not tell his family about his movie work. But when they thought he was losing his mind because he was acting like his characters at home, he told them about his extracurricular activities. Most of his films from this period were lost when the Vitagraph film library burned on July 2, 1910.

During the production of Pardon My Scotch (1935), he accidentally broke three ribs when the table he was standing on, which was rigged to split in half on cue, split incorrectly. The take that caused the injuries remains in the film, and was later reused in the short Dizzy Detectives (1943).

At the time their mother, Jennie Horwitz, died in 1936, he and brother Shemp Howard had been keeping secret from her that her son, Irving Horwitz, whom she doted on the most, had died three weeks before she did.

When The Three Stooges shorts began to appear on local children's shows in the late 1950s, there was a wave of kids poking each other in the eyes. When Moe heard about this, it was the Stooges who came to the rescue. They went on many local television shows, as well as national television, and showed how the eye-pokes were done in a way that nobody got hurt. To the kids watching, it was like learning a magic trick.

In addition to himself, Moe also supplied the voices for other characters on the animated series The New 3 Stooges (1965). For example, in "A Flycycle Built for Two", he also was the voice of Orville Wright.

Their final film Kooks Tour has an odd history. Conceived in 1970 as a series of comedy travelogues showing the now retired Stooges hitting the road the production was halted by Larry having a stroke. The unfinished pilot was padded out to sixty minutes with beauty shots of Yellowstone Park then shelved for nearly 10 years. It was finally released for home use on Super 8 but few people were willing to spend $200 to see it.

Moe never wore a wig, even in his senior years, when he allowed his trademark "soup bowl" haircut to turn gray. In a 1973 appearance on the "'Mike Douglas (I)' Show" Moe claimed he had it styled by the same barber (on Vine Street in Hollywood) for almost 40 years. And he demonstrated how he simply combed it straight back when he wasn't working.

He, Emil Sitka and Joe DeRita ("Curly Joe") were slated to appear in the R-rated comedy film "The Jet Set" (eventually retitled Blazing Stewardesses (1975)). However, because he was suffering from lung cancer, Moe was forced to drop out of the film. The Ritz Brothers replaced Moe, Sitka and DeRita.

The Three Stooges finally received their star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame August 30, 1983 the East side of the 1500 block of Vine Street and 2 thousand people came to see the unveiling.

He died five days before Chris Diamantopoulos, who plays 'Moe' in The Three Stooges (2012), was born.