50 facts about Billy Connolly, Scottish comedian, musician, presenter and actor

1. William "Billy" Connolly, is a Scottish comedian, musician, presenter and actor.

2. Billy Connolly is sometimes known, especially in his native Scotland, by the nickname "The Big Yin" ("The Big One").

3. Billy Connolly's first trade, in the early 1960s, was as a welder (specifically a boilermaker) in the Glasgow shipyards, but he gave it up towards the end of the decade to pursue a career as a folk singer in The Humblebums alongside friend Gerry Rafferty until 1971 and subsequently as a soloist.

4. In the early 1970s, he made the transition from folk-singer with a comedic persona to fully-fledged comedian.

5. Billy Connolly is also an actor and has appeared in such films as Water (1985); Indecent Proposal (1993); Muppet Treasure Island (1996); Mrs. Brown (1997); The Boondock Saints (1999); The Man Who Sued God (2001); The Last Samurai (2003); Timeline (2003); Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004); Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties (2006); Open Season (2006); The X-Files: I Want to Believe (2008); Open Season 2 (2008); Brave (2012) and The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014). Connolly reprised his role as Noah "Il Duce" MacManus in The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day (2009).

6. Billy Connolly was born at 69 Dover Street, "on the linoleum, three floors up" "at six o'clock in the evening", in Anderston, Glasgow, to William and Mary Connolly (née McLean).

7. Billy Connolly's paternal grandfather was an Irish immigrant.

8. Billy Connolly's mother's family came from the west coast of Scotland.

9. The section of Dover Street, between Breadalbane and Claremont Streets, in which Connolly was born was demolished in the 1970s. Connolly refers to this in his 1983 song "I Wish I Was in Glasgow" with the lines "I would take you there and show you, but they've pulled the building down" and "They bulldozed it all to make a road".

10. The flat had only two rooms: a kitchen-living room, with a niche where the children slept, and another room for their parents. The family bathed in the kitchen sink and there was no hot water.

11. His maternal great-great-great-grandfather, John O'Brien, fought at the Siege of Lucknow during the Indian Rebellion of 1857. He was wounded during the long siege. He married a local 13-year-old Indian girl called Matilda and settled in India after his military service.

12. In 1946, when he was barely four years old, Connolly's mother abandoned her children while their father was serving as an engineer in the Royal Air Force in Burma.

13. Billy Connolly and his older sister, Florence (named after their maternal grandmother and eighteen months his senior), were cared for by two aunts, Margaret and Mona Connolly, his father's sisters, in their cramped tenement in Stewartville Street, Partick. "My aunts constantly told me I was stupid, which still affects me today pretty badly. It's just a belief that I'm not quite as good as anyone else. It gets worse as you get older. I'm a happy man now but I still have the scars of that."

14. The aunts resented the children for the fact that they had to sacrifice their young lives to look after them. It was Mona who was troubled the most by having to care for her niece and nephew. "It was very big of her to take on the responsibility but, having said that, I wish people wouldn't do that. I wish people wouldn't be very big for five minutes and rotten for twenty years. Just keep your 'big' and keep your 'rotten' and get out of my life, because, quite frankly, I would rather have gone to a children's home and be with a lot of other kids being treated the same. To this day I'm still working on the things she did to me."

15. Billy Connolly credits one of John Bradshaw's publications with helping him deal with his past demons. "He reckons that if this trauma happened to you when you were five or six, then, emotionally, that part of you remains five or six. And what you have to do is carry that five- or six-year-old around with you and try and emotionally help that other part of you. It sounds a bit airy-fairy, but I think he's something of a genius, Mr Bradshaw."

16. Connolly Sr returned from the war, a stranger to his children, shortly after the move to Partick. He never spoke to them about their mother's departure.

17. Connolly's biography, Billy, written by wife Pamela Stephenson, documented years of physical and sexual abuse by his father, which began when he was ten and lasted until he was about fifteen "Sometimes, when father hit me, I flew over the settee backwards, in a sitting position. It was fabulous. Just like real flying, except you didn't get a cup of tea or a safety belt or anything."

18. In 1949, Mona gave birth to a child, Michael, by a "local man". He was presented as a brother to Billy and Flo, and nobody questioned it.

19. Billy Connolly attended the now-defunct St. Peter's Primary School, located directly across the street from the family's tenement. "The school was very violent indeed. At first, in the infant school, the nuns were very violent. And then over here (at St Peter's) they were just strapping you all the time. I had a psychopath in here, called McDonald - Miss McDonald. "Big Rosie", they called her. There was a guy with glasses in my class and she called him "four eyes", and she was a teacher."

20. It was while at St Peter's that Connolly decided he wanted to make people laugh. "I can remember the moment in the school playground. I would have been 7 or 8. And I was sitting in a puddle and people were laughing. I had fallen in it and people found it funny. And it wasn't all that uncomfortable, so I stayed in it longer than I normally would, because I really enjoyed the laughing. My life was very unhappy at the time, and laughter wasn't something I heard all the time, so it was a joy. And I realised quickly that if you can have an audience this way, life was rather pleasant."

21. Billy Connolly later attended St. Gerard's Secondary School (also defunct) in Govan, on the southern side of the River Clyde.

22. At age 12, Connolly decided he wanted to become a comedian but did not think that he fit the mould, feeling he needed to become more "windswept and interesting".

23. In the 1950s, Glasgow's sandstone tenements fell out of favour with the planners, which resulted in new houses being built on the fields and farmlands in the outskirts of the city.

24. Between the ages of fourteen and twenty, Connolly was brought up on a now-demolished council estate on Kinfauns Drive in the Drumchapel district of Glasgow, and would make the daily journey to school in Govan by bus and then a ferry across the Clyde.

25. Billy Connolly revisited this tenement in Drumchapel during filming for the South Bank Show in 1992. "It eventually started to pall. This dreadful atmosphere came about the place. It's like Siberia. And once you're out here, there's no getting out of it. You have to buy your way out, or some kind of talent has to take you out, or you have to be very bright and move away to university."

26. Also at fourteen, Connolly started to become interested in music - mainly Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry.

27. At 15, he left school with two engineering qualifications, one collected by mistake which belonged to a boy named Connell.

28. Billy Connolly worked for John Smith's Bookshop, on St Vincent Street, delivering books on his bicycle.

29. He also became a delivery-van driver with Bilslands' Bakery until he was sixteen, when he was deemed overqualified (due to his J1 and J2 certificates) to become an engineer.

30. Instead, he worked as a boilermaker at Alexander Stephen and Sons shipyard in Linthouse.

31. His foreman was Sammy Boyd, but the two biggest influences on him were Jimmy Lucas and Bobby Dalgleish.

32. Billy Connolly also joined the Territorial Army Reserve unit 15th (Scottish) Battalion, the Parachute Regiment (15 PARA).

33. Billy Connolly later commemorated his experiences in the song "Weekend Soldier".

34. Connolly's The Big Yin nickname was first used during his adolescent years to differentiate between himself and his father. "My father was a very strong man. Broad and strong. He had an 18½-inch neck collar. Huge, like a bull. He was "Big Billy" and I was "Wee Billy". And then I got bigger than him, and the whole thing got out of control. And then I became The Big Yin in Scotland. So, we'd go into the pub and someone would say, 'Billy Connolly was in.' 'Oh? Big Billy or Wee Billy?' 'The Big Yin.' 'Oh, Wee Billy.' If you were a stranger, you'd think, 'What are these people talking about?'"

35. In the early 1960s, Connolly attended the Edinburgh Festival Fringe for the first time. After spending time on the city's Rose Street, patronising the various drinking establishments, he became enamoured by some long-haired musicians and decided to model himself on them.

36. In 1965, after he had completed a five-year apprenticeship as a boilermaker, Connolly accepted a ten-week job building an oil platform in Biafra, Nigeria. Upon his return to Scotland, via Jersey, he worked briefly at John Brown & Company, but decided to walk out on a Fair Friday to focus on being a folk singer.

37. In 1972, Connolly made his theatrical debut, at the Cottage Theatre in Cumbernauld, with a revue called Connolly's Glasgow Flourish. He played the Edinburgh Festival Fringe with poet Tom Buchan, with whom he had written The Great Northern Welly Boot Show, and in costumes designed by the artist and writer John Byrne.

38. On New Year's Eve 1985, Connolly became tee-total, having been an alcoholic. He credits Michael Caine with kickstarting the drive to sobriety after the pair worked together in Water. His wife, Pamela Stephenson, also had a hand in it, giving Connolly the ultimatum of giving up the drink or giving up her.

39. Although Connolly had performed in North America as early as the 1970s, and had appeared in several movies that played in American theatres, he nonetheless remained relatively unknown until 1990 when he was featured in the HBO special Whoopi Goldberg and Billy Connolly in Performance, produced by New York's Brooklyn Academy of Music. Goldberg introduced Connolly, and his performance has been cited as the moment that officially launched his career in the States.

40. Connolly has also written several books, including Billy Connolly (late 1970s) and Gullible's Travels (early 1980s), both based upon his stage act, as well as books based upon some of his "World Tour" television series. He has stated that his comedy does not work on the printed page.

41. Billy Connolly has been married to his second wife, comedian and psychologist Pamela Stephenson, since 1989.

42. Billy Connolly is father to five children: two (Jamie and Cara) from his first marriage, to Iris Pressagh, and three (Scarlett, Amy and Daisy) from his second.

43. Connolly and Stephenson won custody of Jamie and Cara in 1983, due to the fact that "[Pressagh] was unable to care for herself, let alone children". Pressagh moved to Spain and became estranged from her children. She died in 2010.

44. Connolly became a grandfather in 2001, when Cara gave birth to Walter.

45. In September 2013 Connolly underwent minor surgery for early-stage prostate cancer. The announcement also stated that he is being treated for the initial symptoms of Parkinson's disease. Connolly admitted earlier in 2013 that he had started to forget his lines during performances.

46. Billy Connolly appeared on Who Do You Think You Are? on 2 October 2014, when his family's Indian ancestry was revealed.

47. He is a fan of Glasgow-based Celtic F.C. and has a seat for life at the club's Celtic Park stadium, an honor bestowed only on him and Rod Stewart.

48. Billy Connolly has stated in the past that he disapproves of Scottish independence, although he also disapproves of entertainers telling people how to vote, but admitted that 2012 had been "a very interesting time for Scotland".

49. Connolly is a patron of the National Association for Bikers with a Disability.

50. Billy Connolly s also a patron of Celtic F.C.'s The Celtic Foundation.

50 things from life of Billy Connolly, Scottish comedian, musician, presenter and actor.