After his longtime on-screen partner and best friend Oliver Hardy passed away in August of 1957, comedy icon Stan Laurel refused to take any more roles. Laurel’s post-Hardy retirement was entirely his own doing and had nothing to do with a lack of roles being made available to him. In fact, Laurel was receiving offers from movie studios left, right, and center, from brief cameos to starring roles in what would have been his first major outings as a solo performer. He was even offered a couple of jobs in a new medium called “television”, which Laurel and Hardy had embarked on a brief flirtation with before the latter became too ill to work. Still, Laurel was steadfast in his decision to never act again and he enjoyed a quiet but well-documented …show more content…
Richards spent the majority of his time on the show mocking his own misfortune and did not see a noteworthy role again until he was cast in Kirstie Alley’s poorly written, poorly planned, and poorly received “sitcom” Kirstie. The Iron Sheik - The Iron Sheik enjoyed his greatest success in the early 1980s as the number one foreign bad guy of the then World Wrestling Federation. During this period, Sheik developed a love of drugs and alcohol which pretty much destroyed his in-ring career and made it impossible for him to find work in the industry to which he had given his best years. Through social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook, The Iron Sheik carved out a new career as an online celebrity, largely owing to his drug-fueled rants about a variety of wrestling stars and larger Hollywood celebrities. The Sheik soon discovered that his newfound social media following could be used to score roles on television talk shows and in commercials, and so he significantly increased his output of racist, homophobic, and totally insane ramblings. Today, The Iron Sheik’s Twitter page reads like the diary of a fallen star willing to do and say whatever it takes to earn some money and keep his name in the virtual