Mae Busch Biography

Fast Facts

• Started acting on the stage and later in vaudeville
• Performed opera for a season, but received mixed reviews
• Was educated in the United States at a convent in New Jersey, but decided not to take her vows
• Often played shrewish, gold-digging floozies in Laurel and Hardy comedies
• Started her motion picture career in early Keystone comedies
• Was one of the leading actresses on the screen in the 1920s, known as the versatile vamp
• Jackie Gleason referred to her as "the ever-popular Mae Busch" on his television show
• Her ashes remained unclaimed from her death in 1946 until 1970, at which point a chapter of the Laurel & Hardy Society, the Way out West Tent, paid or their interment
• Her name appears as one of the leading characters in the script for "Block-Heads," but other studio commitments kept her from taking the role
• Once claimed that she learned to swim and dive in Tahiti in order to get a part in a short, but her inexperience soon showed through