Information from http://www.historyinanhour.com/2011/09/04/big-in-albania/. This online blog article is about Norman's success in Albania. This is particularly useful to me because I will be focusing on this part of Norman's life in my dissertation. As it is a blog, this information in this article is not 100% reliable but it does give me a good basic outline of Norman's success in Albania.

Big in Albania

Posted on September 4, 2011 by Rupert Colley

A friend of mine has just returned to England after an adventurous trip around south-eastern Europe, taking in the sites of Montenegro, Croatia and Albania. She was very complimentary about the first two but rather damning about the latter. My colleague is Canadian and also fairly young, having been born in the seventies, so she asked me who was this guy the Albanians kept talking about, a guy called Norman Wisdom.
A household name
Aha, I said, Sir Norman, 95 years-old and a classic British comedy icon. OK, Wisdom’s slapstick humour looks a bit dated now and not really suited to our sophisticated tastes but he remains a household name in Britain – well, to anyone over 40. And, it seems, a household name in Albania.
During the long, forty-four year rule of Stalinist dictator, Enver Hoxha, Wisdom’s films were amongst the few bits of Western culture or entertainment that were allowed in this small, cut-off, forgotten country called Albania, or, to use its correct title of the time, the People’s Socialist Republic of Albania. Films like Trouble In Store, A Stitch In Time and The Early Bird, made in the fifties and early sixties, had Wisdom playing the hapless character, Norman Pitkin, fighting against the big men in suits smoking on cigars. Hoxha saw Pitkin as the ultimate proletarian, waging a one-man war against the capitalist world of corporations and big money. This, the dictator dictated, was appropriate Communist viewing for Albania’s comedy-starved masses and, as a result, our very own Norman became a huge hit in Albania.
Albania v England
I remember watching on TV a football match between Albania (playing at home) and England in about March 1989. By this time Hoxha was dead but the country was still a closed nation. Sir Norman came onto the pitch as a pre-match or half-time entertainment, dressed from head-to-foot in the colours of England down one half of his body; and the Albanian colours the other half. He danced across the pitch, executing his trademark trip, and then exited to huge rounds of applause. There may have been more – I can’t remember.
In 1995, after the fall of Communism, Wisdom was granted the freedom of Albania’s capital, Tirana. And during an appearance on England’s training ground in Albania in 2001, Wisdom still managed to cause great excitement. In the post-Cold War years Wisdom did much to support the many orphanages of Albania and showed great interest as the country started on its difficult journey from Communism to democracy.

The Economist

An article by the Economist about Norman's life and personality. All information from http://www.economist.com/node/17248920





WHAT a chirpy little fellow that Norman was! All puppy eyes, rubber legs and innocent smiles, even when the world was crashing round him. Show him a grand piano, and he’d have to dive into it. Suggest a manhole, and he’d plummet straight down it. Run a cable across the road and he’d go flying into next week. He’d fall over his own shadow, or box it into a pulp behind the sofa; he’d fall over his own feet, and saunter on singing.
It’s true they didn’t find him uproarious everywhere. He’d rock them in the aisles in Blackpool, but raise only a shrug in New York. His mime of eating a sandwich on a fast-moving train would leave them cold in Glasgow, but make them fall about in Tehran—and in Moscow and Buenos Aires and, very oddly, in Tirana, where perhaps the only possible reason was that they were as mad as himself.
He was born grinning, it seemed. He was certainly born small, and never made much progress after. The littlest in his gang at school, the tiny cabin boy aboard the Maindy Court sailing for Argentina, almost the scrawniest in his regiment in India in the 1930s. Everyone’s mascot, jester, dogsbody, hoping to foil the punches by rolling over and begging for a pat on the head. He was five-foot-four on a good day, easily dwarfed by bosses, army sergeants, aristocrats or rivals for the willowy girls who strolled into his life. When his second wife walked out on him in 1968 he couldn’t help remarking, bitterly, that she had left him for someone handsomer and taller.
Smallness shaped Little Norm, but poverty taught him something, too. As a boy, thrown out by his drunken father, he slept rough in London and stole to eat. The gutter wasn’t a bad place, considering. He learned things there, such as how to lift eggs very nimbly and delicately from a stall and secrete them, uncracked, in his pockets. He also acquired the trick of making his lower lip tremble when asking, his pathetic face only just above the counter, for a free pie from a coffee stall. By the time of his first hugely successful film, “Trouble in Store” (1953), he could stretch the pathos really far: to the point where, soaking wet after a tumble into a duck-pond, he sadly serenaded his love in a teashop, and then found he had nothing in his pockets to pay with except one small, wriggling fish.

Norman Wisdom - A Very British Icon

Below is an article I found on a blog site. This is useful to me because the blogger talks about why the British people took to Norman Wisdom and why he was a success not only here in Great Britain but in Albania and Iran, also. He also talks about how British comedy has changed. (Article from paulowensblog.blogspot.com)

Tuesday, 5 October 2010

RIP Norman Wisdom: A Very British Icon

His films weren't sophisticated or especially original. But Norman Wisdom was one of those stars the public held a special place for in their hearts and not just in Albania where he was famously a superstar. According to Shappi Khorsandi he was just as big a star in Iran. Perhaps it's because we grew up with him. Perhaps it was because his films were innocently entertaining and were so quintessentially British, the triumph of the little man against the bullies. His particular type of comedy eventually went out of fashion when the cool 60s came along, but it is telling that they remained popular on TV and with successive generations of kids in the same way that the likes of Laurel and Hardy continued to entertain us long after they had passed into cinematic history.

Most of us have seen them and, though they may not rank as cinematic classics in the true sense of the word, they somehow gained a place in our affections. We've all seen On the Beat in which he was too short to be a policeman but donned his father's old uniform anyway causing chaos; The Early Bird in which he was a milkman fighting off the nasty corporate interloper alongside the famous Mr Grimsdale; or Up in the World in which he was a window cleaner and subjected to tickle torture by his employer's son. Like I say, sophisticated he was not. But then he never claimed to be. He just tried to entertain.

He was one of those actors who had the gift to appear normal and like the rest of us. Perhaps it wasn't a gift at all. Perhaps that was just what he was. For all of his wealth and success he never seemed like a star in the normal sense of the word. One can't imagine Norman making demands for huge trailers, food flown in from afar and drinks at a specific temperature. He was just the working man made good, one of us who got lucky. His ability to project that on screen was what made him so huge.

But he was also a brilliant clown and physical comedian. That trademark walk and the trips and falls were the hallmark of a man who could make people laugh with a minimum of effort. Such comedy was looked down on for many years. But it is no accident that it remains lodged in our memories and inspires our affection. Indeed when he was knighted in 2000 he did one of his trademark trips. The Queen was amused.

Now we live in an age of celebrity, when actors and singers can become iconic figures and identifiable by a single name. Norman Wisdom became a very British version of that, without really trying. Somehow it seems wrong to refer to him by his surname. He was just Norman, the little man in the cap, the classic British underdog; and that's why we loved him.

Nothing but Trouble

This article that I found on tcm.com is useful to my project because it is mostly about Norman's first film 'Trouble in Store'. This is helpful because it is one of my focus films. Also, this article mentions Norman's 'Gump' character. His appearance will be a large part of my dissertation so any information on this is important.

As the document is quite hard to read, I have posted the link below.

http://www.tcm.com/this-month/article/183279%7C0/Trouble-in-Store.html

Little Big Man

Below is an article I found online that sums up Norman's career. It also talks about his success in Albania which is important to my project.

Internet Extracts

Below are extracts I have found on the internet that I think will be useful to me. Mostly, they are about Norman's rise to fame in the 1940's. Most of these sources are online newspapers so they are reliable sources for me to use as research.

www.economist.com

www.dailymail.co.uk

www.dailymail.co.uk 'How Norman really did laugh all the way to his grave'

www.hollywood.com Norman Wisdom Biography

Norman Wisdom interview in The Mirror in 2000

www.hollywood.com Norman Wisdom Biography

Theatre Posters

The images below are some theatre posters I have found (from sirnormanwisdom.co.uk). I thought they were quite interesting because they represent the start of Norman's career. They help me to get a better idea of the type of performance he did before becoming a film star.