Alice Faye

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Alice Faye

Alice Faye (born Alice Jeane Leppert on May 5, 1915 – May 9, 1998) was an American actress and singer, remembered first for her stardom and then feud at 20th Century Fox and, later, as the radio comedy partner of her second husband, bandleader-comedian Phil Harris.

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[edit] Early life

Born in New York City, she was the daughter of a New York police officer of German descent and his Irish-American wife, Charley and Alice Leppert. Faye's entertainment career began in vaudeville as a chorus girl, before she moved to Broadway and George White's Scandals in the late 1920s. By this time, she had adopted her stage name and first reached a radio audience on Rudy Vallee's hit, The Fleischmann Hour (1932-1934), where she may have met her future husband and comedy partner Harris for the first time.

[edit] Film career

Meanwhile, she got her first major film break in 1934, when Lilian Harvey abandoned the lead role in a film version of George White's Scandals, in which Vallee was also to appear. Hired first to perform a musical number with Vallee, Faye ended up as the female lead. And she became a hit with film audiences of the 1930s, particularly when Fox mastermind producer Darryl F. Zanuck made her his protege. He softened Faye from a wisecracking show girl to the youthful but somewhat motherly figure she played in a few of Shirley Temple's hit films.

Faye also received a physical makeover, from being something of a singing version of Jean Harlow to sporting a softer look with a more natural tone to her blonde hair and more mature makeup. This transition was practically a plot point of 1938's Alexander's Ragtime Band, in which Faye's ascent (she plays a singer who moves from barrooms to fame) is dramatized by her increasingly elegant grooming.

Cast in musicals most of all, Faye introduced many popular songs to the hit parade. Considered less than serious as an actress and more than serious as a singer, Faye nailed what many critics consider her best acting performance in 1937's In Old Chicago. She more than held her own---in spite of a mild speech impediment softening her "r"s---with co-stars such as Vallee, Al Jolson, Charlotte Greenwood, and Edward Everett Horton, as well as leading men such as Don Ameche, Tyrone Power, and John Payne.

Color film flattered Faye enormously, and she shone in the splashy musical features that were a Fox trademark in the 1940s. She frequently played a performer, often one moving up in society, allowing for situations that ranged from the poignant to the comic. Weekend in Havana and That Night in Rio (atypically, as a Brazilian aristocrat) made good use of Faye's husky singing voice, flair for carrying off the era's exaggerated fashions, and solid comic and romantic timing. 1943's The Gang's All Here is perhaps the epitome of these films, with lavish production values and a range of supporting players (including the memorable Carmen Miranda in the indescribable "Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat" number) that camouflage the film's trivial plot and leisurely pacing.

Faye's career continued until 1944 when she was cast in Fallen Angel---whose title became only too telling, as circumstances turned out. Designed ostensibly as Faye's vehicle, the film all but became her celluloid epitaph when Zanuck---trying to build his new protege, Linda Darnell---ordered many Faye scenes cut and Darnell bumped up. When Faye saw a screening of the final product, she drove away from the Fox studio refusing to return, feeling she had been undercut deliberately by Zanuck.

Zanuck hit back, it is said, by having Faye blackballed for breach of contract, effectively ending her film career. Released in 1945, Fallen Angel was Faye's final film as a major Hollywood star.

Gossip magazines of the time speculated that Faye was fired over a reputed rivalry with Betty Grable, a claim that both women---who remained friends until Grable's death---disputed hotly enough. But seventeen years after the Fallen Angel debacle, Faye went before the cameras again, in 1962's State Fair. While Faye received good reviews, the film was not a great success, and she made infrequent cameo appearances thereafter.

[edit] Marriage and radio career

Faye's first marriage, to Tony Martin in 1937, ended in divorce in 1940. A year later, however, she married Phil Harris---the marriage became a plotline on an episode of the hit radio show hosted by Harris's then-employer, Jack Benny---and struck platinum in both her personal and her professional life.

The couple had two daughters, Alice (b. 1942) and Phyllis (b. 1944), and began working in radio together as Faye's film career collapsed. First, they teamed to host a variety show on NBC, The Fitch Bandwagon, in 1946. Originally conceived as a music showcase as well as a haven for Harris and Faye's tart comic style, the show came to center more on the couple and, by 1948, Fitch bowed away as sponsor in favour of Rexall, the pharmaceutical giant, and the show was revamped entirely into a situation comedy called The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show.

Harris's comic talent was already familiar through his long tenure on the Benny show, where he played Benny's wisecracking, jive talking hipster bandleader. Now, with their own show revamped to a sitcom, bandleader Harris and singer-actress Faye played themselves, raising two precocious children in and out of slightly zany situations, mostly involving Harris's bandmate Frank Remley (Elliott Lewis), obnoxious delivery boy Julius Abruzzio (Walter Tetley, familiar as nephew Leroy on The Great Gildersleeve), Robert North as Faye's fictitious deadbeat brother, Willie, and sponsor's representative Mr. Scott (Gale Gordon), and usually involving bumbling, malapropping Harris needing rescue from acidly loving Faye---the show was an NBC radio fixture until 1954. The Harris's two daughters were played on radio by Jeanine Roos and Anne Whitfield.

Faye singing ballads and swing numbers in her honey contralto voice was a regular highlight of the show, as was a knack for tart one-liners equal to her husband's. The show's running gags also included portraying Faye as something close to an heiress ("I'm only trying to protect the wife of the money I love" was a typical Harris gag) and occasional barbs by Faye aimed at her rift with Zanuck, usually referencing Fallen Angel in one or another way.

[edit] Later life

Faye and Harris continued various projects, individually and together, for the rest of their lives. Faye in later years became a spokeswoman for Pfizer Pharmaceuticals, promoting the virtues of an active senior lifestyle. The Faye-Harris marriage endured until Harris's death in 1995; before that, the couple donated a large volume of their entertainment memorabilia to Harris's hometown Linton, Indiana.

Three years after her husband's death, Alice Faye died in Rancho Mirage, California from stomach cancer at the age of 83. She was buried with her husband at the Forest Lawn Cemetery (Cathedral City) near Palm Springs, California. She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in recognition of her contribution to Motion Pictures at 6922 Hollywood Boulevard. The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show remains a favourite of old-time radio collectors.

[edit] Filmography

[edit] External links

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