Billie Ritchie

Billie Ritchie, born William Hill on 5 September 1874 in Scotland, was a comedian and Broadway performer whose career spanned music hall stages, silent film, and the American theatrical circuit. He died on 6 July 1921 from stomach cancer, having spent his final years largely inactive due to a series of on-set injuries.

Ritchie first built his reputation as a performer for British music hall producer Fred Karno, establishing transatlantic recognition through that association a full decade before Stan Laurel and Charlie Chaplin followed a comparable path. He developed tramp and drunk character personae during and prior to his Karno years, personae he would carry into his American stage work and later into film. Charlie Chaplin introduced variations on those same character types to film audiences in shorts including the Henry Lehrman-directed Kid Auto Races at Venice, released 7 February 1914, and Mabel's Strange Predicament, released 9 February 1914.

Ritchie's Broadway career ran from 1906 to 1918. He starred in Round the Clock, a production connected to Lee Orean Smith's musical Around the Clock, in which he played the drunk character Billie Smith. He toured in that production during two separate periods, 1906 to 1908 and again from 1911 to 1913. He also appeared in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1918.

Between 1914 and 1920, Ritchie worked extensively in silent comedy short films for producer-director Henry Lehrman's L-KO Motion Picture Company and the Fox Film Sunshine Comedy unit. In 1918, Dutch illustrator David Bueno de Mesquita created a comic book featuring Ritchie titled Billie Ritchie en zijn ezel, which stands as the first celebrity comic in Dutch history.

Ritchie's widow, Winifred Frances, who had also been his stage partner, later worked for Charlie Chaplin as a wardrobe mistress. Their daughter, Wyn Ritchie, was likewise a performer and became the wife of songwriter Ray Evans, a marriage that lasted 55 years.