Larry Fine - Acting Career

Acting Career

As Larry Fine, he first performed as a violinist in vaudeville at an early age. In 1925, he met Moe Howard and Ted Healy. Howard and his brother Shemp had been working as audience stooges for Healy. Shemp left soon after to attempt a solo career and was in turn replaced by another brother, Curly. Larry's trademark bushy hair had its origin, according to rumor, from his first meeting with Healy: he had just wet his hair in a basin, and it dried oddly as they talked. Healy encouraged him to keep the zany hairstyle and, according to a 1973 TV interview on the Mike Douglas show with Moe:

Beginning in 1933, the team made 206 short films and several features, their most prolific period starring Larry, Moe and Curly. Their career with Healy was marked by disputes over pay, film contracts, and Healy's drinking and verbal abuse. They left Healy for good in 1934.

In many of the Stooge shorts, Fine did more reacting than acting, staying in the background and serving as the voice of reason in contrast to the zany antics of Moe and Curly. He was easily recognized by his hairdo, bald on top with lots of thick, bushy, curly hair around the sides and back for which Moe would often call him "Porcupine". He was a surrealistic foil and the middle ground between Moe's gruffly "bossy" and Curly and Shemp's (and later Joe's and Curly Joe's) childish personae. And like the other Stooges, he was often on the receiving end of Moe's abuse. His reasonableness was the perfect foil to Moe's brusque bluntness and Curly or Shemp's boyish immaturity, but Larry would sometimes propose something impossible or illogical and be quickly put down by Moe, both verbally and physically, who would often react by pulling a handful of hair out of Larry's head.

But in the earliest Stooge two-reelers (and occasionally the later ones), Larry frequently indulged in utterly nutty behavior. He would liven up a scene with a random improvised remark or ridiculous action. In the hospital spoof Men in Black, Larry, wielding a scalpel, chortles, "Let's pluck him... and see if he's ripe!" In Disorder in the Court, a tense courtroom scene is interrupted by Larry breaking into a wild Tarzan yell. Of course, after each of his outbursts, Moe would gruffly put him down. According to his brother, Larry developed a callus on one side of his face from being slapped innumerable times by Moe over the years.

Larry's on-screen goofiness was an extension of his own relaxed personality. Director Charles Lamont recalled, "Larry was a nut. He was the kind of guy who always said anything. He was a yapper." Writer-director Edward Bernds remembered that Larry's suggestions for the scripts were often "flaky" but occasionally contained a good comic idea.

The Stooges became a big hit on television in 1959, when Columbia Pictures released a batch of the trio's films whose popularity brought them to a new audience and revitalized their careers.