| Stepin Fetchit | |
|---|---|
| Born | Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry May 30, 1902 Key West, Florida U.S. |
| Died | November 19, 1985 (aged 83) Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California U.S. |
| Occupation | Actor |
| Years active | 1925-1976 |
Stepin Fetchit (May 30, 1902 – November 19, 1985) was the stage name of American comedian and film actor Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry.[1]
Perry parlayed the Fetchit persona into a successful film career, eventually becoming a millionaire, the first black actor in history to do so. He was also the first black actor to receive a screen credit.[2]
Perry's typical film persona and stage name have long been controversial, and seen as illustrative of negative stereotypes of African-Americans. Seen through a modern lens, Perry's "laziest man in the world" character can be "painfully racist" but also "subversive".[3]
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Little is certain about his background other than that he was born in Key West, Florida to West Indian immigrants.[2] He was the second child of Joseph Perry, a cigar maker from Jamaica (although some sources indicate the Bahamas) and Dora Monroe, a seamstress from Nassau. Both of his parents came to the United States in the 1890s, where they married. By 1910, the family had moved north to Tampa, Florida. Another source says he was adopted when he was eleven years old and taken to live in Montgomery, Alabama.[2]
His mother wanted him to be a dentist, so Perry was adopted by a quack dentist, where he blacked boots before running away at age twelve to join a carnival. He earned his living for a few years as a singer and tap dancer.[2] By the age of twenty, Perry had become a Vaudeville artiste and the manager of a traveling carnival show. He performed a vaudeville act with a partner, with the two of them being known as "Step" and "Fetchit." When Perry became a solo act he combined the two names, which later became his professional name.
Perry began entertaining in his teens as a comic character actor. His stage name was a contraction of "step and fetch it", or perhaps, "step in [and] fetch it." According to his entry in Ephraim Katz's The Film Encyclopedia, he borrowed his screen name from a racehorse that won him some money in his pre-Hollywood days.
Perry played comic relief roles in a number of films, all based on his character known as "The Laziest Man in the World." In his personal life, Perry was highly literate and had a concurrent career writing for the Chicago Defender.
Perry starred in Hearts in Dixie (1929), one of the first studio productions to boast a predominantly African-American cast.[4]
For his role as Joe in the 1929 part-talkie film version of Show Boat,[5] Perry's singing voice was supplied by Jules Bledsoe, who had originated the role in the stage musical. Fetchit did not "sing" "Ol' Man River", but instead a new song used in the film, "The Lonesome Road". Bledsoe was actually seen singing "Ol' Man River" in the sound prologue shown preceding the film.
Perry was good friends with fellow comic actor Will Rogers,[2] and they appeared in four films together, David Harum (1934), Judge Priest (1934), Steamboat 'Round the Bend (1935), and The County Chairman (1935).
Perry spawned imitators, most notably, Willie Best (Sleep 'n Eat) and Mantan Moreland, the scared, wide-eyed manservant of Charlie Chan (Perry actually played a manservant in the Chan series before Moreland - in 1935's Charlie Chan in Egypt).[6]
Perry did not invent the stereotype with which his stage name became synonymous, but Stepin Fetchit's image was used to popularize it. Many black film characters were based on Stepin Fetchit, including Matthew Beard's "Stymie" in the Our Gang comedies. (Perry repaid the reference: he guest-starred in an Our Gang short, A Tough Winter, intended as the pilot film for a Fetchit short subject series producer Hal Roach had planned, but which never materialized.)
Fetchit appeared in 54 films between 1925 and 1976, and has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in the category "Motion pictures".
While Perry was the first black actor to become a millionaire, he was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1947, stating assets of $146.[2]
Perry reportedly converted to Islam in the 1960s[2] and became a friend of heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali.[2] Perry also found himself in conflict during his career with civil rights leaders who criticized him personally for the film roles he portrayed. However, to some extent Perry had the last laugh: in 1976, the Hollywood chapter of the NAACP awarded him a Special NAACP Image Award. Two years after that, Perry was inducted into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame.
In April 1969, Perry's son, Donald Lambright, traveled the Pennsylvania Turnpike shooting people. He injured 15 and killed 3 before turning the gun on himself.[7]
A stroke in 1976[2] ended Perry's acting career, and he moved into the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital.[2] He died November 19, 1985 from pneumonia at age 83.
Fetchit's stage name was parodied by the late 1960s/early 1970s counterculture comedy duo The Congress of Wonders, portraying a young Russian lad named Stepney Fetchnik on their September 1970 comedy album Revolting. It was also spoofed on an episode of The Golden Girls, in which Rose Nylund (Betty White) tells a story about two dancers from her hometown of St. Olaf, Minnesota, Adolf Stepp and Olga Fetchik, who became "the internationally renowned Scandinavian dance team of Stepp 'n' Fetchik."
The Stepin Fetchit image came to be seen as sufficiently degrading that Perry's films are rarely shown, and have not received widespread video release. On the rare occasions the films are shown, most of his segments are deleted.
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