Billie Ritchie
William Hill, known professionally as Billie Ritchie (5 September 1874 – 6 July 1921), was a Scottish comedian who first gained transatlantic fame as a performer for British music hall producer Fred Karno — thus, a full decade before Stan Laurel and Charlie Chaplin took a similar career path. Ritchie is best recalled today for the silent comedy shorts he made between 1914 and 1920 for director/producer Henry Lehrman's L-KO Kompany and Fox Film Sunshine Comedy unit. Biography. Variations on Ritchie's "tramp" and "drunk" personae – which Ritchie claimed he had developed before and during his Karno  years – were introduced to film audiences by Charlie Chaplin in such shorts as the Lehrman-directed "Kid Auto Races at Venice" (7 February 1914) and "Mabel's Strange Predicament" (9 February 1914). Ritchie, who, due to a series of on-set injuries, spent his final years relatively inactive, succumbed to stomach cancer in the summer of 1921. Winifred Frances, the comedian's widow, and one-time stage partner, wound up in the employ of Charlie Chaplin as a wardrobe mistress, showing there was no animosity between the two performers. Wyn Ritchie, their daughter, was also a performer, and, in private  life, the wife (for 55 years) of songwriter Ray Evans. In popular culture. In 1918 Dutch illustrator David Bueno de Mesquita created a comic book about Ritchie named "Billie Ritchie en Zijn Ezel" ("Billie Ritchie and his Donkey"). This was the first celebrity comic in Dutch history.