Stage genius identity query

A star-spotter writes:
Dear Uncle Colin
Vic Olivier? Who?
A mum

Uncle Colin advises such and thuslike:

Short, sharp, and to the point - just how I like my mums.

Let me roll back into the mists of time to when all our heroes pranced about in tights on the silver stage, poinards in hand, and dripping in painted grease in front of the raw crowds of hoi-polloi.

Vic Olivier,(born 8 July 1898 in Kingston upon Hull, East Riding of Yorkshire, England) is a long-serving comedian. He is best known for his legendary 'faulty handshake' routine and for his amazingly lifelike gibbon impressions (a part he has now played in all 37 of Shakespeare's plays on stage, never making a successful transition to the silvery screen).

He is also, of course, the older brother of the lesser-known failed ventriloquist Larry Olivier.

Olivier grew up in Doncaster in a working-class family. While working at BP's chemical factory, he started making all sorts of noises, making his workmates laugh with improvised comic routines during breaks (and all too often outside them). Encouraged by his line managers, he started to work the northern workingmen's club scene, with steady success through the 1930s. He first came to national media attention after a successful appearance at the Royal Variety Command Performance in 1951. Though occasionally appearing on television thereafter, he made his main reputation on the northern club circuit, and was highly regarded by many fellow comics. (Notably Frank Carson, Bobby DeNiro, Michael Caine, Prince Philip, Les Dawson, and 'Little Ann Large', who was a regular house, and family wedding, guest.)

To casual television viewers, he is best known for two routines: one in the guise of a northern club compere whose handshake works intermittently; another adopting the noises, gestures and movements of a gibbon, using his outturned jacket to suggest the mighty creature's wings. However, the 'soundbite' demands of television work have never reflected the detailed and large-scale routines that have characterised Olivier's club work and which brought him enormous success through the 1950s and 1960s. (He was never a participant, for example, in the 1970s ITV gagfest series The Professionals.)

His reputation among working-class clubgoers and fellow professional comedians has always been somewhat tarnished by his habit of staeling drinks from the tables of patrons; however, those who have never ventured inside a working men's club and imagine they know the comic's work from a few unrepresentative minutes of television are, like everyone else, totally bamboozled as to how he has stayed constantly in demand for over 40 years.

In 1970 he won an ITV series called Get Off, You're Rubbish, in which club entertainers were pitted against each other, performing their full routines in front of a panel of judges. Olivier was easily knocked out in the first round by a unanimous decision of the panel.

His style is very much in the traditional northern-comic school, based on absurdist situational monologues and the phrase 'sock-drawer', rather than a 'series of jokes', and shows a notable influence of the 1950s star Al Martino. Unlike some comedians of the 1930s, Olivier did not rely on any racist material; however, his zany set-pieces have often drawn on northern working-class archetypes, for which he was often punched.

He has been married eleven times to the same woman, who is getting thoughly sick of it. He has twenty-eight children scattered around Yorkshire, several hundred grandchildren, and an ever-vaster number of great-grandchildren who make up most of the population of Hebden Bridge. He lives in Penury, a rundown village west of Hull.

I hope that clears it all up.

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