W.C. Fields

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).

His son, with wife Hattie, William C. "Claude" Dukenfield, was born on July 28, 1904. He had another son, born on August 15, 1917, with girlfriend Bessie Poole, named William Rexford Fields Morris.

He was in each of the Ziegfeld Follies from 1915 through 1921.

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.

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.

At the time of his death, Fields was rumored to be working on a screenplay entitled Grand Motel, intended as a parody of M-G-M's 1932 Best Picture Oscar winner Grand Hotel.

According to film historians, he performed in only one film exactly according to script and as directed. That one was MGM's David Copperfield (1935), in which he co-starred with Freddie Bartholomew, who was only ten years old. Fields admired the Charles Dickens book and wanted desperately to play Mr. Micawber in the movie, so he agreed to forego his usual ad-libs and put aside his distaste at working with child actors.

He was the second choice to play the title role in The Wizard of Oz (1939). There are still some arguments as to why he turned the part down. Some sources say that he refused to play "The Wizard" because MGM wouldn't pay the salary he wanted, but according to Doug McClelland, author of "Down the Yellow Brick Road", Fields was too busy writing and acting in his latest film for Universal Pictures--You Can't Cheat an Honest Man (1939)--to be loaned out to MGM to play the part.

The last movie he starred in, Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941), included a character he had always wanted to have in one of his movies: a young woman (in this case his niece, played by Gloria Jean) who loved him unconditionally.

Although his marriage to Harriet Hughes lasted until his death in 1946, they separated as early as in 1904.

His wife Harriet Hughes was born in 1878 and died on November 7, 1963.

Pictured on a 15¢ US commemorative postage stamp in the Performing Arts and Artists series, issued 29 January 1980 (100th anniversary year of his birth).

Is portrayed by Chuck McCann in Mae West (1982) and by Rod Steiger in W.C. Fields and Me (1976)

Biography in: "Who's Who in Comedy" by Ronald L. Smith, pg. 160-163. New York: Facts on File, 1992. ISBN 0816023387