Career
Perry began entertaining in his teens as a comic character actor. His stage name was a contraction of "step and fetch it", or perhaps, "step in fetch it". According to his entry in Ephraim Katz's The Film Encyclopedia, he borrowed his screen name from a racehorse that won him some money in his pre-Hollywood days.
Perry played comic relief roles in a number of films, all based on his character known as "The Laziest Man in the World". In his personal life, Perry was highly literate and had a concurrent career writing for the Chicago Defender.
Perry starred in Hearts in Dixie (1929), one of the first studio productions to boast a predominantly African-American cast.
For his role as Joe in the 1929 part-talkie film version of Show Boat, Perry's singing voice was supplied by Jules Bledsoe, who had originated the role in the stage musical. Fetchit did not "sing" "Ol' Man River", but instead a new song used in the film, "The Lonesome Road". Bledsoe was actually seen singing "Ol' Man River" in the sound prologue shown preceding the film.
Perry was good friends with fellow comic actor Will Rogers, and they appeared in four films together, David Harum (1934), Judge Priest (1934), Steamboat 'Round the Bend (1935), and The County Chairman (1935).
Perry spawned imitators, most notably, Willie Best (Sleep 'n Eat) and Mantan Moreland, the scared, wide-eyed manservant of Charlie Chan (Perry actually played a manservant in the Chan series before Moreland - in 1935's Charlie Chan in Egypt).
Perry did not invent the stereotype with which his stage name became synonymous, but Stepin Fetchit's image was used to popularize it. Many black film characters were based on Stepin Fetchit, including Matthew Beard's "Stymie" in the Our Gang comedies. (Perry repaid the reference: he guest-starred in an Our Gang short, A Tough Winter, intended as the pilot film for a Fetchit short subject series producer Hal Roach had planned, but which never materialized.)
Fetchit appeared in 54 films between 1925 and 1976, and has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in the category "Motion pictures".
Read more about this topic: Stepin Fetchit
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