Eddie Laughton

He was born Edgar Hugh Laughton in Sheffield, Yorkshire, England. Laughton's family immigrated to the United States in 1909 and settled in Detroit. He started in vaudeville and by 1926 was established in Toronto as a popular master of ceremonies. Larry Fine, not yet one of the Stooges, was touring in vaudeville, and he and Laughton were old friends. (Fine had saved Laughton's job by going onstage one night as an emergency substitute.)^[2]

The pencil-mustached Laughton was placed under contract by Columbia Pictures in 1935, almost certainly thanks to Fine. Laughton worked at Columbia almost exclusively for 10 years, in features, westerns, short subjects, and serials throughout the 1930s and 1940s.^[3] Modern viewers will remember Laughton for his role as "Percy Pomeroy, convict 41144" in the Stooge comedies So Long Mr. Chumps and Beer Barrel Polecats, the desk clerk in Three Little Beers and Idle Roomers, or the happy drunk in Loco Boy Makes Good. Laughton was an excellent utility player, useful in good-guy and bad-guy roles alike. (He and fellow Columbia stock player John Tyrrell shared many scenes, often as getaway-car drivers in features and shorts.)

According to the United Kingdom's Cinematograph Films Act of 1927, Hollywood companies had to release Canadian-made films if they wanted their American films to be distributed in Canada. Columbia complied by sending its casts and crews to Canadian studios in 1938 and 1939, where Columbia could exercise some control over the productions. Many of the Columbia contractees sent to Canada had British or Canadian roots, Eddie Laughton among them.^[4]

Eddie Laughton was also a convincing dialect comedian, playing a French nobleman in Buster Keaton's She's Oil Mine, and an English big-game hunter plastered with pies in the Stooges' In the Sweet Pie and Pie.^[5]

In addition to his roles in the Stooge shorts, he traveled with the team between filming schedules, acting as their straight man in personal appearances.^[3]

Eddie Laughton died of pneumonia on March 21, 1952, just two months after the death of Curly Howard, who died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage. Both he and Curly were born in the same year; 1903, and were both 48 years old when they died within two months of each other in 1952.