Billy Connolly found his calling sitting in a school playground puddle
Aged seven or eight, a Glasgow boy fell into a puddle, heard the other children laughing, and stayed sitting there to keep them going. Life at home was miserable, and the laughter felt like joy. That boy became Billy Connolly, the Big Yin, often voted Britain's greatest stand-up comedian and knighted in 2017.
His birthplace, on 24 November 1942, was a tenement at 69 Dover Street in Anderston, Glasgow: a two-room flat with no hot water where the family washed in the kitchen sink. The street was later bulldozed for a road, a loss he lamented in I Wish I Was in Glasgow, a song from 1983. When he was four, his teenage mother left while his father served with the Royal Air Force in Burma. Connolly has said he never felt abandoned by her. He and his sister Florence, his fierce defender, were raised by two aunts in a Partick tenement, and he has described lasting damage from their belittling and from his father's abuse.
From 14 he lived on a Drumchapel council estate, which he joked was in Glasgow but just outside civilisation. He left school at 15, delivered books by bicycle, drove a bakery van, then became a boilermaker at the Alexander Stephen and Sons shipyard in Linthouse. Late in the 1960s he quit welding for folk music, singing in the Humblebums with Gerry Rafferty and Tam Harvey until 1971.
His between-song patter gradually took over. In 1972 he staged Connolly's Glasgow Flourish in Cumbernauld and released his first solo album, and in 1975 his D.I.V.O.R.C.E. topped the UK singles chart. That year he also first sat on the Parkinson sofa, returning a record 15 times. Films followed, among them Mrs Brown in 1997, which earned a BAFTA nomination for best actor, alongside The Last Samurai and Brave.
He retired from comedy in 2018 and turned to drawing and printmaking, saying art had given him a new lease of life. For his 75th birthday, Jack Vettriano, John Byrne and Rachel Maclean painted portraits later added to Glasgow's mural trail, and in 2022 he received the BAFTA Fellowship.
Source: Billy Connolly
