Laurel and Hardy were a motion picture comedy team whose official filmography consists of 106 films released between 1921 and 1951. Together they appeared in 34 silent shorts, 45 sound shorts, and 27 full-length sound feature films. In addition to these, Laurel and Hardy appeared in at least 20 foreign-language versions of their films and a promotional film, Galaxy of Stars (1936), made for European film distributors.
Stan Laurel (1890–1965) and Oliver Hardy (1892–1957) were established as film comedians prior to their teaming, with Laurel appearing in over 50 silent films and Hardy in over 250. (Hardy also appeared in three sound features without Laurel.) Although they first worked together in the film The Lucky Dog (1921), this was a chance pairing and it was not until 1926 when both separately signed contracts with the Hal Roach film studio that they appeared in movie shorts together.
Laurel and Hardy officially became a team the following year, in their eleventh silent short film The Second Hundred Years (1927) and in 1934 produced their most popular holiday classic, Babes In Toyland (aka March Of The Wooden Soldiers). The pair remained with the Roach studio until 1940. Between 1941 and 1945 they appeared in eight features and one short for 20th Century Fox and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. After finishing their movie commitments Laurel and Hardy concentrated on stage shows, embarking on a music hall tour of Great Britain. In 1950, they made their last film Atoll K, a French/Italian co-production.
In 1932 Laurel and Hardy’s short The Music Box won the Academy Award for Live Action Short Film (Comedy). In 1960, Laurel was presented with an Honorary Academy Award “for his creative pioneering in the field of cinema comedy.” In 1992, 1997, 2012 and 2020 respectively, Big Business (1929), The Music Box, Sons of the Desert (1932) and The Battle of the Century (1927) were added to the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”. For their contributions to cinema, Laurel and Hardy have been awarded separate stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Laurel & Hardy – Youtube Playlist
