Stan Laurel

Usually played a childishly innocent man who always looked up to his good friend Oliver Hardy, whether it was deserved or not. Common schticks included crying in cases of great predicaments, taking instructions literally at all times and mixing up his lines. He and Hardy often had a scene in their films where they would get into a fight with another person that consisted solely of destroying property. The duo would destroy something the opponent values while the opponent looks on and does not resist. When they are done, the opponent does the same to them, while they refrain from resisting, and so on.
Wide, "hanger-in-my-mouth" smile, spiky hair sported in all of his films, and of course, the "whiny face" for which he is famous.
Completely vacant stare into the camera, accentuated by white pancake makeup.
Gaze into the camera with arms up and palms out in a "What now?" gesture.
White magic.

When Oliver Hardy died, Stan swore he would never perform comedy again. Over the next eight years, he repeatedly turned down a number of offers to do public appearances.
On February 23, 1965, Laurel told his nurse he wouldn't mind going skiing right at that very moment. Somewhat taken aback, the nurse replied that she didn't know he was a skier. "I'm not," said Stan, "I'd rather be doing that than have all these needles stuck into me!" A few minutes later, the nurse looked in on him again and found that Stan had quietly passed away.
In his later years, he was arguably the most approachable of all movie stars, keeping his phone number in the phone book, welcoming all sorts of visitors, and responding to his fan mail personally.
When Stan Laurel died, Buster Keaton said 'Forget Chaplin. Stan was the greatest'.
While rarely credited as a writer or director, he was the driving creative force behind the team of Laurel and Hardy. Whenever Oliver Hardy was asked a question about a gag, story idea, or plot line, he always pointed to Laurel and said, "Ask Stan." Laurel often worked well into the night, writing and editing their films.

If any of you cry at my funeral, I'll never speak to you again!
A friend once asked me what comedy was. That floored me. What is comedy? I don't know. Does anybody? Can you define it? All I know is that I learned how to get laughs, and that's all I know about it. You have to learn what people will laugh at, then proceed accordingly.
[on Oliver Hardy's death] The world has lost a comic genius. I've lost my best friend.
Crazy humor was always my type of humor, but it's the quiet kind of craziness I like. The rough type of nut humor like The Marx Brothers I could never go for.
[about the eight films he and Oliver Hardy made at 20th Century-Fox in the 1940s] We had no say on those films, and it sure looked it.