Actors - Billy Connolly

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	Actors - Billy Connolly

William "Billy" Connolly, CBE, D.Litt (born 24 November, 1942) is a comedian, musician, presenter, and actor. He is sometimes known, especially in his native Scotland, by the nickname "The Big Yin" ("The Big One", a reference to his height).

Background

Billy Connolly was born at 65 Dover Street in Glasgow, Scotland, to Mary and William Connolly, the son of an Irish immigrant. In 1946, with their son barely four years old, Connolly's parents divorced. He and his sister, Florence ("Flo"), would be looked after by two aunts, Margaret and Mona, his father's sisters.

Connolly was brought up in the Anderston, and later Partick, districts of Glasgow. He attended St. Peter's Primary School in Glasgow and St. Gerard's Secondary School in Govan. At the age of 12, he decided he wanted to become a comedian but felt he didn't fit the mold; he felt he needed to become more "windswept and interesting". Instead, at the still-tender age of 15, he dropped out of school and became a welder in a Glasgow shipyard. Around the same time he joined the Territorial Army's Parachute Regiment. At the medical, the doctor noted to him, "You're not very big downstairs, are you?", to which Connolly replied, "I thought we were only going to fight them."

In 1965, after he had completed a five-year apprenticeship as a welder, Connolly accepted a ten-week job building an oil rig in Nigeria. Upon his return to Scotland, he focused on being a folk singer.

On 27 June, 1969, a 26-year-old Connolly married his first wife, Iris Pressagh. In December of that year, his first child, Jamie, was born. He would have four more children - one (Cara - b. 1973) with Iris and three with his second wife, Pamela: Daisy (December 31, 1983), Amy (1986), and Scarlett (1988).

His biggest break came when he appeared on the BBC's Parkinson talk show in 1975. He would become close friends with the host Michael Parkinson and would make six more appearances on the show over the next three decades. "That programme changed my entire life," he later said.

In 1976, Connolly opened for Elton John on the latter's US tour. "In Washington, some guy threw a pipe and it hit me right between my eyes," he told Michael Parkinson two years later. "It wasn't my audience. They made me feel about as welcome as a fart in a spacesuit."

In 1985, he divorced from his wife of sixteen years (they had separated four years earlier). He was awarded custody of their two children. That same year, he recorded An Audience With....

1986 saw him visit Mozambique to record a documentary for Comic Relief.

Connolly completed his first world tour in 1987, including six nights at the Royal Albert Hall in London, which resulted in the Billy and Albert video.

When the Fox Network aired Freedomfest: Nelson Mandela's 70th Birthday Celebration in 1988, Connolly was still virtually unknown in the States, but his performance drew attention, particularly from producers, and interest in him grew.

In 1989, Connolly's father passed away after a stroke, his eighth. His mother died only four years later. On December 20, 1989, in Fiji, Connolly married his current wife, New Zealand-born (but a naturalised Australian) Pamela Stephenson, with whom he had been living since 1981. "Marriage to Pam didn't change me, it saved me," he later said. "I was going to die. I was on a downwards spiral and enjoying every second of it. Not only was I dying, but I was looking forwards to it." It's rumoured that when Stephenson first met her future spouse, he swore so much that she thought he had Tourette's Syndrome.

In 1990, HBO brought him to the US, where he appeared as half of Whoopi Goldberg
and Billy Connolly in Performance, a special produced by New York's Brooklyn Academy of Music. Goldberg introduced Connolly, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Connolly was dealt a blow in 1993 when his best friend and fishing partner, Jimmy Kent, passed away.

In early January 1994, Connolly began a 40-date World Tour of Scotland, which would be broadcast by the BBC later in the year as a six-part series. It was so well received that the BBC signed him up to do a similar tour two years later, this time in Australia. The eight-part series followed Connolly on his custom-made Harley Davidson trike .

Also in 1996, Connolly recorded a BBC special, entitled A Scot in the Arctic, in which he spends a week by himself in the Arctic Circle. A notable feature of these shows is that he strips naked in one scene in each of them, usually in some remote wilderness area where no one is likely to complain, although for Comic Relief he once danced naked around Piccadilly Circus.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Billy Connolly ]

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Actors - Billy Connolly

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