Stanley Holloway

Stanley Holloway was an accomplished singer and actor, a disarmingly funny comedian, and a superb monologist. The son of a lawyer's clerk, he was born Stanley Augustus Holloway in London's East End on October 1, 1890. After working in the office of a fish market in Billingsgate, the lad began his performing career as "Master Stanley Holloway -- The Wonderful Boy Soprano." At the age of 17 he sang with a concert-party providing entertainment at East Coast seaside resorts. In 1913 he traveled to Milan, Italy, where he received voice training in preparation for a career in opera. Holloway served in the infantry during the First World War, spending four years in the Connaught Rangers ("The Devil's Own"). Although an estimated 2,500 members of this regiment were slain during the Great War, Holloway survived and immediately began singing and acting in London's music halls and theaters, performing at the Winter Garden as Captain Wentworth in Guy Bolton and P.G. Wodehouse's Kissing Time in 1919, and as Rene in A Night Out in 1920. Holloway made his motion picture debut in 1921, appearing in a silent movie engagingly entitled The Rotters. That same year, working in collaboration with fellow singing comedian Leslie Henson, Holloway helped to form a London-based touring musical revue called the Co-Optimists. This troupe would virtually reinvent itself every year through 1929, and they were filmed in 1930. Holloway established himself as a BBC radio personality in 1923 and developed his solo act throughout the 1920s while continuing his involvement with the musical theater. He was cast as Bill Smith in the London production of Vincent Youmans' musical comedy Hit the Deck (1927), in Song of the Sea (1928), and in Coo-ee (1929). He began recording his monologues for the phonograph...