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

Contents

Early life

Film career

Marriage and radio career

Later life

Filmography

External links

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 1931. 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.

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 a youthful, yet somewhat motherly figure such as she played in a few Shirley Temple 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 - 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. Films such as ''Weekend in Havana'' and ''That Night in Rio'' (atypically, as a Brazilian aristocrat) made good use of Faye's husky singing voice, solid comic timing, and flair for carrying off the era's starry-eyed romantic storylines. 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 emphasized. 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 last film as a major Hollywood star.
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 only infrequent cameo appearances in films thereafter.

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. This marriage became a plotline on an episode of the hit radio show hosted by Harris's then-employer, Jack Benny, which struck platinum in both Faye's 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 declined. 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.

Later life

Faye and Harris continued various projects, individually and together, for the rest of their lives. Faye made a return to Broadway after forty-three years in a revival of ''Good News'', opposite her old Fox partner John Payne (who was replaced by Gene Nelson). In later years, Faye 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.

Filmography

★ ''George White's Scandals'' (1934)

★ ''Now I'll Tell'' (1934)

★ ''She Learned About Sailors'' (1934)

★ ''The Hollywood Gad-About'' (1934) (short subject)

★ ''365 Nights in Hollywood'' (1934)

★ ''King of Burlesque'' (1935)

★ ''George White's 1935 Scandals'' (1935)

★ ''Every Night at Eight'' (1935)

★ ''Music Is Magic'' (1935)

★ ''Poor Little Rich Girl'' (1936)

★ ''Sing, Baby, Sing'' (1936)

★ ''Stowaway'' (1936)

★ ''In Old Chicago'' (1937)

★ ''Cinema Circus'' (1937) (short subject)

★ ''On the Avenue'' (1937)

★ ''You Can't Have Everything'' (1937)

★ ''Wake Up and Live'' (1937)

★ ''You're a Sweetheart'' (1937)

★ ''Sally, Irene and Mary'' (1938)

★ ''Alexander's Ragtime Band'' (1938)

★ ''Tail Spin'' (1939)

★ ''Rose of Washington Square'' (1939)

★ ''Hollywood Cavalcade'' (1939)

★ ''Barricade'' (1939)

★ ''Little Old New York'' (1940)

★ ''Screen Snapshots: Seeing Hollywood'' (1940) (short subject)

★ ''Lillian Russell'' (1940)

★ ''Tin Pan Alley'' (1940)

★ ''That Night in Rio'' (1941)

★ ''The Great American Broadcast'' (1941)

★ ''Week-End in Havana'' (1941)

★ ''Hello, Frisco, Hello'' (1943)

★ ''The Gang's All Here (film)'' (1943)

★ ''Four Jills in a Jeep'' (1944)

★ ''Fallen Angel'' (1945)

★ ''Screen Snapshots: Hula from Hollywood'' (1954) (short subject)

★ ''State Fair'' (1962)

★ ''Won Ton Ton, the Dog Who Saved Hollywood'' (1976)

★ ''Every Girl Should Have One'' (1978)

★ ''The Magic of Lassie'' (1978)

★ ''We Still Are'' (1985) (short subject)

★ ''A Century of Cinema'' (1994) (documentary)

★ ''Carmen Miranda: Bananas Is My Business'' (1995) (documentary)

External links

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★ Photographs of Alice Faye