Roscoe, one of nine children, was the baby of the family who weighed a reported 16 pounds at birth. Born in Smith Center, Kansas, his family moved to California when he was a year old. At 8, he appeared on the stage. His first part was that of a picaninny kid with the Webster-Brown Stock Company. From then until 1913, Roscoe was on the stage performing everything from acrobatic acts, to clown, to singer. His first real professional engagement was in 1904, singing illustrated songs for Sid Grauman at the Unique theater, San Jose, at $17.50 a week. He later worked in the Morosco Burbank stock company and traveled through China and Japan with Ferris Hartman. His last appearance on the stage was with Hartman in Yokahama in 1913 where Roscoe played the Mikado. Back in California, Roscoe went to work at Mack Sennett's studio. He was hired at $40 a week to work at Keystone. For the next three and one half years, he never starred or even featured, but appeared in hundreds of one reel comedies. He would play mostly policeman, usually with the Keystone Cops, but he also played different parts. He would work with Mabel Normand, Fred Sterling, Charlie Chaplin and learn about the process of making movies from Director Henry Lehrman, who directed all but two of his pictures. Roscoe was a gentle and genteel man off screen and always believed that Sennett never thought that he was funny. Roscoe never used his weight to get a laugh. He would never be found stuck in a chair or doorway. He was remarkably agile for his size and used that agility to find humor in situations. By 1914, Roscoe also directed some of his one reelers. By 1915, he moved up to two reelers which meant that he would need to sustain the comedy to be successful, which he was. He appeared in films such as Fatty Again, Fatty, Mabel and the Law, Mabel and Fatty's Wash Day, Mabel and Fatty Viewing the World's Fair at San Francisco, Fatty's Reckless Fling and so on. For Mabel and Fatty Viewing the World's Fair at San Francisco, Keystone took the actors and crew to the real World's Fair to use it as the background for the movie so that the cost to them was small, while the background was expensive. By 1917, Roscoe formed a partnership with Joseph M. Schenck who was the husband of Norma Talmadge. The company was Comique and the films that Roscoe made were released through the Famous Players on a percentage basis. With his own company, Roscoe had complete creative control over his productions. He also hired a young performer that he met in New York by the name of Buster Keaton. Buster Keaton's film career would start with Roscoe in The Butcher Boy. Roscoe wrote his own stories first, tried them out and then devised funny little twists to generate the laughs. Roscoe's comedy star was second only to Charlie Chaplin. With the success of Comique, Paramount asked Roscoe to move from the two reel films to feature films in 1919. Roscoe' first full length feature was The Round-Up and it was successful. It was soon followed by other features such as Brewster's Millions and Gasoline Gus. But tragedy struck on Labor Day, 1921 with the arrest and trial of Roscoe on manslaughter charges. Roscoe's roommate had thrown a party in their suite which was crashed by a disreputable starlet named Virginia Rappe who fell seriously ill and died a few days later. The papers, led by the Hearst group, made this incident Hollywood's first truly major scandal. On the day fellow Paramount Director William Desmond Taylor was murdered, Roscoe was notified as he sat at the counsel table awaiting the verdict of the jury in his second manslaughter trial. Roscoe, who had known Taylor since they were both directors at Paramount, was visibly affected. Although eventually acquitted after a third trial in 1923, Roscoe's career was finished as the papers printed unfounded story after story about his supposed guilt, causing a public outcry of moral outrage. Unable to return to the screen, Roscoe later found work as a comedy director for Al St. John, Buster Keaton and others under a pseudonym William Goodrich. In 1932, Sam Sax signed Roscoe to appear in comic shorts for Warner Brothers starting with Hey, Pop!. Roscoe completed six shorts and showed the magic and youthful spirit that he had a decade before. With the success of the shorts, Warner Brothers signed Roscoe to a feature film contract, but he died in his sleep, at 46, the night after he signed the contract.


Brewster's Millions (1921): $5,000
Safe in Jail (1913): $3/day

Obese comic actor whose career was ended by a scandal. After his career was ruined, Buster Keaton personally supported him as repayment for giving him his break into film. Was tried three times for rape and manslaughter of Virginia Rappe. The first trial (November 14-December 4, 1921) ended with the jury deadlocked 10 to 2 in favor of acquittal. The second trial (January 11-February 3, 1922) also ended in a hung jury; this time the majority had ruled against Roscoe - 10 to 2 for conviction. The third trial (March 13-April 12, 1922) finally ended with an acquittal after the jury deliberated for less than 5 minutes compared with 43 hours straight in the first trial and 44 hours in the second trial. Uncle of Al St. John Biography in: "Who's Who in Comedy" by Ronald L. Smith; pg. 21-22. New York: Facts on File, 1992. ISBN 0816023387 He was the very first actor to be paid a million dollars a year. The legend that his box office clout faltered after the scandal is not entirely true. Actually his films were making just as much money as they had been before the scandal, the problem was that with all the scathing headlines about him, studios were reluctant about putting him under contract and so he had problems getting work. Biography in: "American National Biography". Supplement 1, pp. 11-13. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Met Buster Keaton accidentally one day while strolling down Broadway in New York City with vaudeville veteran Lou Anger. Anger, who was an old stage acquaintance of Keaton's, introduced them. Arbuckle immediately invited Keaton to visit the Colony Studio where he was about start a series of two-reel comedies for Joseph M. Schenck. The famous duo was thusly formed. It the subject of the novel "I, Fatty" by Jerry Stahl. Arbuckle is the only person to have the three top silent film comedians, Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd appear in supporting roles in his films; Chaplin assists Arbuckle in The Knockout (1914) Lloyd is his co-star in Miss Fatty's Seaside Lovers (1915) and Keaton supported him in at least 14 shorts. Salary in 1921, $1,000,000. Began his career as an entertainer in vaudeville at the age of 12 in order to survive, after his mother died and his alcoholic father had abandoned him. Arbuckle hated the nickname "Fatty" and insisted that his friends and acquaintances always address him by his real first name, Roscoe.