He ran away from home repeatedly, beginning at the age of nine, often to stay with his grandmother or an uncle. Ĭlaude Dukenfield (as he was known) had a volatile relationship with his short-tempered father. After marrying, he worked as an independent produce merchant and a part-time hotel-keeper. The 1876 Philadelphia City Directory lists James Dukenfield as a clerk. Fields's mother, Kate Spangler Felton (1854–1925), was a Protestant of British ancestry. James Dukenfield served in Company M of the 72nd Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment in the American Civil War and was wounded in 1863. His father, James Lydon Dukenfield (1841–1913), was from an English family that emigrated from Sheffield, Yorkshire, England, in 1854. Fields by Himself, it was shown that Fields was married (and subsequently estranged from his wife), financially supported their son, and loved his grandchildren.įields was born William Claude Dukenfield in Darby, Pennsylvania, the oldest child of a working-class family. Beginning in 1973, with the publication of Fields's letters, photos, and personal notes in grandson Ronald Fields's book W. It was maintained by the publicity departments at Fields's studios ( Paramount and Universal) and was further established by Robert Lewis Taylor's biography W. His film and radio persona was generally identified with Fields himself. His subsequent stage and film roles were often similar scoundrels or henpecked everyman characters.Īmong his trademarks were his raspy drawl and grandiloquent vocabulary. He became a star in the Broadway musical comedy Poppy (1923), in which he played a colorful small-time con man. He began to incorporate comedy into his act and was a featured comedian in the Ziegfeld Follies for several years. Fields's career in show business began in vaudeville, where he attained international success as a silent juggler.
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