W. C. Fields

Born William Claude Dukenfield, Fields worked up from vaudeville juggling to Broadway and then to film, where he built a career on the persona of a muttering, hard-drinking misanthrope who trusted no institution and few people. That persona is a magnet for lines he may never have said — he leaned into it himself with a joke campaign book, Fields for President, during the 1940 election. The voting quip reached print in 1949, after his death in 1946, in his first major biography.