Lester Townes "Bob" Hope (né Leslie Townes Hope; May 29, 1903 – July 27, 2003) was a British-born American comedian, actor, musician, entertainer and producer with a career that spanned nearly 80 years and achievements in vaudeville, network radio, television, and USO Tours. He appeared in more than 70 short and feature films, starring in 54, including a series of seven Road to ... musical comedy films with Bing Crosby as his partner. He reached his 100th birthday 59 days before he died in 2003.
Hope hosted the Academy Awards ceremony a record 19 times. He also appeared in many stage productions and television roles and wrote 14 books. The song "Thanks for the Memory" was his signature tune. He was praised for his comedic timing, specializing in one-liners and rapid-fire delivery of jokes that were often self-deprecating. Between 1941 and 1991, he made 57 tours for the United Service Organizations (USO), entertaining military personnel around the world. In 1997, Congress passed a bill that made him an honorary veteran of the Armed Forces.
Hope was born in the Eltham district of southeast London. He arrived in the United States with his family at the age of four, and grew up near Cleveland, Ohio. He became a boxer in the late 1910s, but moved into show business in the early 1920s, initially as a comedian and dancer on the vaudeville circuit before acting on Broadway. He began appearing on radio and in films in his 30s, starting in 1934.
Leslie Townes Hope was born on May 29, 1903, in Eltham, County of London (now part of the Royal Borough of Greenwich), in a terraced house at 44 Craigton Road in Well Hall, where there is now a British Film Institute 'Centenary of British Cinema' commemorative plaque in his memory. He was the fifth of seven sons of William Henry Hope, a stonemason from Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, and Welsh mother Avis (née Townes), a light opera singer from Barry, Vale of Glamorgan, who later worked as a cleaner. William and Avis married in April 1891 and lived at 12 Greenwood Street in Barry before moving to Whitehall, Bristol, and then to St George, Bristol. The family emigrated to the United States aboard the SS Philadelphia, passing through Ellis Island, New York on March 30, 1908, before moving on to Cleveland.
From age 12, Hope earned pocket money by singing, dancing, and performing comedy on the street. He entered numerous dancing and amateur talent contests as Lester Hope, and won a prize in 1915 for his impersonation of Charlie Chaplin. For a time, he attended the Boys' Industrial School in Lancaster, Ohio, and as an adult donated sizable sums of money to the institution. He had a brief career as a boxer in 1919, fighting under the name Packy East. He had three wins and one loss, and he participated in a few staged charity bouts later in life. In December 1920, 17-year-old Hope and his brothers became US citizens when their British parents became naturalised Americans. He legally changed his name from Leslie to Lester. Bob attended Fairmount Junior High and then East High in Cleveland but left before graduating.
In 1921, while working as a lineman for a power company, Hope was assisting his brother Jim in clearing trees when a tree fell, striking his face; his injuries required reconstructive surgery, which contributed to his later distinctive appearance. In his teens, he worked as a butcher's assistant, then briefly at Cleveland's Chandler Motor Car Company in his early 20s.
Hope and his girlfriend later signed up for dancing lessons, encouraged after they performed in a three-day engagement at a club. Hope then formed a partnership with Lloyd Durbin, a friend from the dancing school. Silent film comedian Fatty Arbuckle saw them perform in 1925 and found them work with a touring troupe called Hurley's Jolly Follies. Within a year, Hope had formed an act called the "Dancemedians" with George Byrne and the Hilton Sisters, conjoined twins who performed a tap-dancing routine on the vaudeville circuit. Hope and Byrne also had an act as Siamese twins; they sang and danced while wearing blackface until friends advised Hope that he was funnier by himself.
In 1929, Hope informally changed his first name to "Bob". In one version of the story, he named himself after racecar driver Bob Burman. In another, he said that he chose the name because he wanted a name with a "friendly 'Hiya, fellas!' sound" to it. In a 1942 legal document, his legal name appears as Lester Townes Hope. After five years on the vaudeville circuit, Hope was "surprised and humbled" when he failed a 1930 screen test for the RKO-Pathé short-subject studio at Culver City, California.
1927–1937: Early theatre and film roles
In the early days, Hope's career included appearances on stage in vaudeville shows and Broadway productions. Hope's first Broadway appearances, in 1927's The Sidewalks of New York and 1928's Ups-a-Daisy, were minor walk-on parts. He returned to Broadway in 1933 to star as Huckleberry Haines in the Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields musical Roberta. Stints in the musicals Say When, the 1936 Ziegfeld Follies with Fanny Brice, and Red, Hot and Blue with Ethel Merman and Jimmy Durante followed.
He began performing on the radio in 1934 mostly with NBC radio, and switched to television when that medium became popular in the 1950s. He started hosting regular TV specials in 1954, and hosted the Academy Awards 19 times from 1939 through 1977. Overlapping with this was his movie career, spanning 1934 to 1972, and his USO tours, which he conducted from 1941 to 1991.
Hope signed a contract with Educational Pictures of New York for six short comedies. The first was a comedy, Going Spanish (1934). He was not happy with it, and told newspaper columnist Walter Winchell, "When they catch [bank robber] Dillinger, they're going to make him sit through it twice." Educational Pictures took umbrage at the remark and canceled Hope's contract after only the one film. He soon signed with the Vitaphone short-subject studio in Brooklyn, New York, making musical and comedy shorts during the day and performing in Broadway shows in the evenings.
1938–1949: Hollywood contract and stardom
Hope moved to Hollywood when Paramount Pictures signed him for the 1938 film The Big Broadcast of 1938, also starring W. C. Fields. The song "Thanks for the Memory", which later became his trademark, was introduced in the film as a duet with Shirley Ross, accompanied by Shep Fields and his orchestra. The sentimental, fluid nature of the music allowed Hope's writers—he depended heavily upon joke writers throughout his career—to later create variations of the song to fit specific circumstances, such as bidding farewell to troops while on tour or mentioning the names of towns in which he was performing.
As a film star, Hope was best known for such comedies as My Favorite Brunette and the highly successful "Road" movies in which he starred with Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour. The series consists of seven films made between 1940 and 1962: Road to Singapore (1940), Road to Zanzibar (1941), Road to Morocco (1942), Road to Utopia (1946), Road to Rio (1947), Road to Bali (1952), and The Road to Hong Kong (1962). At the outset, Paramount executives were amazed at how relaxed and compatible Hope and Crosby were as a team. What the executives didn't know was that Hope and Crosby had already worked together (on the vaudeville stage in 1932), and that working so easily in the "Road" pictures was just an extension of their old stage act.
Hope had seen Lamour performing as a nightclub singer in New York, and invited her to work on his United Service Organizations (USO) tours of military facilities. Lamour sometimes arrived for filming prepared with her lines, only to be baffled by completely rewritten scripts or ad-libbed dialogue between Hope and Crosby. Hope and Lamour were lifelong friends, and she remains the actress most associated with his film career although he made movies with dozens of leading ladies, including Katharine Hepburn, Paulette Goddard, Hedy Lamarr, Lucille Ball, Rosemary Clooney, Jane Russell, and Elke Sommer.