Moore Marriott

Largely forgotten today, comic actor Moore Marriott reigned supreme for a time in the 1930s alongside Will Hay and Graham Moffatt in British film farce. The trio came about by happenstance, but it was their audiences who insisted they reappear together again and again. Born in 1885, Marriott started off on the stage as a youngster with his theatrical family. The dark, curly-haired natural made his debut on film as an infant and reportedly made a number of silent films for the Hepworth Company, but credits are sketchy. By the 1920s he had churned out a number of pictures including By the Shortest of Heads (1915), The Monkey's Paw (1923) and The Gold Cure (1925), sometimes in a lead. By the advent of sound, however, he found his niche playing countrified character folk. He played much, much older than he really was (by at least 20-30 years), and audiences took to his doddering old fool act, and he essayed a host of assorted toothless, muttering coots. Marriott was unbilled in his first