Fred Kitchen

Biography

Fred Kitchen, the great and golden hearted artist was the creator of the sentence "Meredith, we have arrived!" - the last sentence in his famous comedy sketch "Moses and Son", which he went on tour with for many years. He was one of Fred Karno's - The King of Vaudeville - leading comedians. And he could hang out with that he was the man who introduced the big, turned outward shoes, which later became Chaplin's * when he was asked why he never was on tour in USA, he said it was because everybody would say that he only tried to look like The Tramp. He helped Chaplin get going when he took his first steps in his career. Kitchen, who was a master comedian himself, taught Chaplin the basis of comic stage art. As seven years old boy he got seven pence a week - in 1918 he got 450 pounds a week with Folies Bergère in Paris. He made the public laugh and cry, that was almost unique at that time. Perhaps that was the main reason for his big popularity. Oposite to most successful vaudeville comedians at that time, he never really went in to the motion picture business. He appeared in one film in 1914 - a one-reeler called 'Freddie's Nightmare', very hard to find today. In the 30s and 40s he appeared as an extra in some few B-films. Unlike most vaudeville comedians from the very early 1900s - most of them stopped acting at least in the early 1920s - he kept his popularity until he felt he was too old to continue, in 1945, aged 73. He died six years later. His son, Fred Kitchen Jr., continued in his father's footsteps.