1880–1946 · American actor, comedian, juggler & writer
Born William Claude Dukenfield in Darby, Pennsylvania, Fields worked his way from vaudeville juggling to the Ziegfeld Follies and then to Paramount, where he built the screen persona that still carries his name: the muttering, put-upon drunk with a talent for the deflating aside. He often wrote his own material, contributing story credits to his 1930s films under joke pseudonyms — Charles Bogle among them, the name on the story for It’s a Gift. That persona is exactly why lines like this one drift toward him: a boozy, contemptuous put-down sounds like something he would have said, which is a different thing from something he did say.