Hal Roach

Roach was born in Elmira, New York, to Charles Henry Roach, whose father was born in Wicklow, County Wicklow, Ireland, and Mabel Gertrude Bally, whose father John Bally hailed from Switzerland. A presentation by the American humorist Mark Twain impressed elementary-school student Roach. Hal's first job was delivering newspapers. One of the subscribers lived at Quarry Farm - Samuel Clemens, more widely known as "Mark Twain".

After an adventurous youth that took him to Alaska, Roach arrived in Hollywood in 1912 and began working as an extra in silent films.

When Hal Roach came to Southern California at the age of 20, he had reached the tail end of a four-year trek across America, which took him from his hometown of Elmira, New York to Alaska, and down the Pacific Coast. Along the way, he picked up the know-how necessary to land work as an extra in a J. Warren Kerrigan western, which was being filmed on location in the desert. It was here that he first met fellow player Harold Lloyd, the first of many talents whom Hal Roach would nurture and build a fortune on. During the filming of a roulette sequence, Roach got himself promoted to the position of technical advisor by pointing out that the ball has to travel in the opposite direction of the wheel – knowledge he had gained in San Francisco's Barbary Coast.

In 1916, Roach's mother and father moved into a house on the Roach studio grounds in Culver City, living there until their death.

In September 1916, Roach married actress Marguerite Nichols, who worked as an actress in the 1930s and 1940s, and died in March 1941. They had two children, Hal Roach Jr., who followed his father as a producer and director, and Margaret Roach.

Roach married a second time, on September 1, 1942, to Lucille Prin, a Los Angeles secretary. They were married at the on-base home of Colonel Franklin C. Wolfe and his wife at Wright-Patterson Airfield in Dayton, Ohio, where Roach was stationed at the time while serving as a major in the United States Army Air Corps. Roach and Lucille had four children, Elizabeth Carson Roach (December 26, 1945 – September 5, 1946), Maria May Roach (born April 14, 1947), Jeanne Alice Roach (born October 7, 1949), and Kathleen Bridget Roach (born January 29, 1951).