Leon Errol

Leon Errol, born Leonce Errol Sims on July 3, 1881, in Sydney, Australia, was a comedian and actor who built a career spanning vaudeville, Broadway, and film across the first half of the twentieth century. The son of Joseph and Elizabeth Sims, he initially studied medicine at the University of Sydney before his involvement writing, directing, and performing in the university's annual theatrical production redirected his ambitions toward entertainment. He died on October 12, 1951, in Hollywood, at the age of seventy.

Before establishing himself in the United States, Errol performed across Australia, New Zealand, and Great Britain and Ireland in settings that included circuses, operettas, and Shakespearean productions. According to his 1914 naturalization petition, he first arrived in the United States in 1898 through the Port of San Francisco. By 1905 he was managing a touring vaudeville company in Portland, Oregon, where he gave an early professional boost to a young comedian named Roscoe Arbuckle. Errol settled permanently in the United States in 1908 and married Stella Chatelaine in Denver, Colorado, in 1906. She died on November 7, 1946, in Los Angeles, and the couple had no children.

Errol reached Broadway in 1911 with the Ziegfeld Follies, where he performed in two skits alongside Bert Williams. His sister, Leda Errol, née Sims, was a personal friend of Follies star Fanny Brice and appeared with him in the production in one- and two-act plays. Errol continued with the Follies through 1915, and in that final year he also served as director of the edition featuring W.C. Fields, Ed Wynn, and Marion Davies among the Ziegfeld Girls. His Broadway career extended from 1911 to 1929 and included the original 1920 production of Jerome Kern's musical Sally, as well as the musicals Louie the 14th, Yours Truly, and Fioretta. During this period he also headlined at the Palace Theatre, representing the pinnacle of vaudeville success.

Errol made his first film in 1916, a comic short subject called Nearly Spliced produced for east-coast filmmaker George Kleine, though it was not released until 1921. He subsequently left Broadway for Hollywood, appearing in Sally and Clothes Make the Pirate alongside Dorothy Gish, both released in 1925. In 1931 he received third billing in Samuel Goldwyn's One Heavenly Night, a film whose box office performance was disappointing. His comic trademark on screen was a wobbly, rubber-legged walk that proved particularly effective in drunk routines.

In 1933 Errol starred in a series of comedy short subjects for Columbia Pictures. The following year at Warner Bros. he headlined two early three-strip Technicolor shorts: Service with a Smile, released July 28, 1934, and Good Morning, Eve!, released September 22, 1934. Service with a Smile preceded RKO's La Cucaracha by five weeks, making it the first live-action all-Technicolor release. In 1934 Errol moved to RKO Radio Pictures, where he starred in six short subjects per year until his death. The series, typically marital farces in which his character became entangled with a pretty girl or a complicated business scheme and faced the anger of his wife, frequently played Dorothy Granger in that role, used the nursery rhyme London Bridge Is Falling Down as its theme.

At RKO, Errol also appeared in the Mexican Spitfire film series from 1939 to 1943, starring alongside Lupe Vélez. He played a dual role in the series: the good-natured Uncle Matt and the befuddled British aristocrat Lord Epping. Following Vélez's death in 1944, RKO continued producing domestic farces with Errol as the central figure. Universal Pictures featured him in fourteen musical-comedy films between 1941 and 1945, as well as in W.C. Fields's Never Give a Sucker an Even Break in 1941 and the thriller The Invisible Man's Revenge in 1944. Monogram Pictures cast him as fight manager Knobby Walsh in eight Joe Palooka sports comedies between 1946 and 1950. His 1951 film Lord Epping Returns, his penultimate screen appearance, revisited the Lord Epping characterization he had introduced in the 1939 feature Mexican Spitfire. Footage from his short subjects was also incorporated into RKO compilation features including Variety Time, Make Mine Laughs, Footlight Varieties, and Merry Mirthquakes, and his shorts became a regular fixture in television syndication.

On February 4, 1950, Errol appeared as a guest on The Ed Wynn Show, broadcast live to the West Coast and seen via kinescope in the East and Midwest on February 18, 1950. He died of a heart attack at Good Samaritan Hospital in Hollywood on October 12, 1951, and was interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. On February 8, 1960, Errol received a star at 6801 Hollywood Boulevard on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.