Curly Howard

At 48 years old, Curly Howard has this physical status:

Howard married his first wife, Julia Rosenthal, on August 5, 1930, but the marriage was annulled shortly afterward.

Howard's first on-stage break was as a comedy musical conductor in 1928 for the Orville Knapp Band. Moe later recalled that his performances usually overshadowed those of the band. Though he enjoyed the gig, he watched as brothers Moe and Shemp with partner Larry Fine made it big as some of Ted Healy's "Stooges". Vaudeville star Healy had a very popular stage act, in which he would try to tell jokes or sing, only to have his stooges wander on stage and interrupt or heckle him and cause disturbances from the audience. Meanwhile, Healy and company appeared in their first feature film, Rube Goldberg's Soup to Nuts (1930).

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Shemp Howard, however, soon tired of Healy's abrasiveness, bad temper, and alcoholism. In 1932, he was offered a contract at the Vitaphone Studios in Brooklyn. With Shemp gone, Moe suggested that Curly fill the third stooge role, but Healy felt that with his thick, chestnut hair and elegant waxed mustache, he looked too good for the part. Howard left the room and returned minutes later with his head shaven (the mustache remained very briefly). In one of the few interviews Curly Howard gave in his lifetime, he complained about the loss of his hair: "I had to shave it off right down to the skin." In 1934, MGM was building Healy up as a solo comedian in feature films, and Healy dissolved the act to pursue his career. Like Shemp, the new team of Moe, Larry, and Curly were weary of Healy's drinking and abrasive personality. That same year, with "The Three Stooges" as the act's new name, they signed to appear in two-reel comedy short subjects for Columbia Pictures. The Stooges soon became the most popular short-subject attraction, with Curly playing an integral part in the trio's work.

Howard's childlike mannerisms and natural comedic charm made him a hit with audiences, particularly children. He was known in the act for having an "indestructible" head, which always won out by breaking anything that assaulted it, including saws (resulting in his characteristic quip, "Oh, look!"). Although having no formal acting training, his comedic skills were exceptional. Often, directors let the camera roll freely and let Howard improvise. Jules White, in particular, left gaps in the Stooge scripts where he could improvise for several minutes. In later years, White commented: "If we wrote a scene and needed a little something extra, I'd say to Curly, 'Look, we've got a gap to fill this in with a "woob-woob" or some other bit of business', and he never disappointed us."

By the time the Stooges hit their peak in the late 1930s, their films had almost become vehicles for Howard's unbridled comic performances. Classics such as A Plumbing We Will Go (1940), We Want Our Mummy (1938), An Ache in Every Stake (1941), Cactus Makes Perfect (1942), and their most violent short, They Stooge to Conga (1943), display his ability to take inanimate objects (food, tools, pipes, etc.) and turn them into ingenious comic props. Moe Howard later confirmed that when Curly forgot his lines, that merely allowed him to improvise on the spot so that the "take" could continue uninterrupted:

Howard also developed a set of Brooklyn-accented reactions and expressions that the other Stooges would imitate long after he had left the act:

On several occasions, Moe Howard was convinced that rising star Lou Costello (a close friend of Shemp's) was stealing material from his brother. Costello was known to acquire prints of the Stooges' films from Columbia Pictures on occasion, presumably to study him. Inevitably, Curly Howard's routines would appear in Abbott and Costello feature films, much to Moe's chagrin. (It did not help that Columbia Pictures president Harry Cohn would not allow the Stooges to make feature-length films like contemporaries Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, and Abbott and Costello.)

Curly was the only "third Stooge" who never made a series of his short films, without Moe or Larry, either before joining the Stooges or after leaving. Shemp and subsequent Stooges Joe Besser and Joe DeRita (referred to during his stint with the Stooges as "Curly Joe DeRita") each starred in their solo series of theatrical short subjects.

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