Early Life
Worth was the youngest of eleven children of a miner. When he was only five months old his father died from injuries resulting from an industrial accident. He left school at 14 and was himself a miner for eight years before joining the RAF. As a teenager he was in the Tankersley Amateur Dramatic Society and taught himself ventriloquism, buying his first dummy in 1936. During World War Two, he performed in an RAF Variety show and had extra material written for him by the show's director, Wallie Okin. He toured for two years with Laurel and Hardy towards the end of their careers. Oliver Hardy persuaded him to drop the ventriloquist routine and concentrate on becoming a comedian which he then did. He did, however, continue to include the vent act in his cabaret act through his career, using much of the material that he'd used during the war. This included an appearance on the Royal Variety Show.
Read more about this topic: Harry Worth
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“Everyone in our culture wants to win a prize. Perhaps that is the grand lesson we have taken with us from kindergarten in the age of perversions of Dewey-style education: everyone gets a ribbon, and praise becomes a meaningless narcotic to soothe egoistic distemper.”
—Gerald Early (b. 1952)
“But the mother’s yearning, that completest type of the life in another life which is the essence of real human love, feels the presence of the cherished child even in the debased, degraded man.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)