William Claude Dukenfield was the eldest of five children born to Cockney immigrant James Dukenfield and Philadelphia native Kate Felton He went to school for four years then quit to work with his father selling vegetables from a horse cart At eleven after many fights with his alcoholic father who hit him on the head with a shovel he ran away from home For a while he lived in a hole in the ground depending on stolen food and clothing He was often beaten and spent nights in jail His first regular job was delivering ice By age thirteen he was a skilled pool player and juggler It was then at an amusement park in Norristown PA that he was first hired as an entertainer There he developed the technique of pretending to lose the things he was juggling In 1893 he was employed as a juggler at Fortescues Pier Atlantic City When business was slow he pretended to drown in the ocean management thought his fake rescue would draw customers By nineteen he was billed as The Distinguished Comedian and began opening bank accounts in every city he played At age twentythree he opened at the Palace in London and played with Sarah Bernhardt at Buckingham Palace He starred at the FoliesBergere young Charles Chaplin and Maurice Chevalier were on the program He was in each of the Ziegfeld Follies from 1915 through 1921 He played for a year in the highly praised musical Poppy which opened in New York in 1923 In 1925 DW Griffith made a movie of the play renamed Sally of the Sawdust 1925 starring Fields Pool Sharks 1915 Fields first movie was made when he was thirtyfive He settled into a mansion near Burbank California and made most of his thirtyseven movies for Paramount He appeared in mostly spontaneous dialogs on Charlie McCarthys radio shows In 1939 he switched to Universal where he made films written mainly by and for himself He died after several serious illnesses including bouts of pneumonia
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