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| Birth Name(s) : Alice Jeanne Leppert |
Date of Birth: May 5, 1915 |
| Status:
Married
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Partner:
Phil Harris |
| Profession:
Actor/Musician |
Official Site
Go to the Alice Faye Official Homepage |
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Full Alice Faye Biography
As A&E's Biography put it, "She rose from the mean streets of New York's Hell's Kitchen to become the most famous singing actress in the world. When the pressures of fame became too much, she had the courage to leave Hollywood on her own terms".
Alice Faye was born Alice Jeanne Leppert in NYC on May 5, 1915. She was to become one of Hollywood's biggest stars of the late 1930's and early 1940's. She started her career as a singer, but later gravitated to film roles.
Alice's first role was in the film SCANDALS in 1934 where she played Mona Vale. Lillian Harvey was set to play the lead role in this film, but quit. Alice inherited the part. She went on to star in Tinseltown's popular and lucrative cookie-cutter musicals and with her distinctive contralto, introduced several songs that became pop standards, notably "You'll Never Know" in the film HELLO, FRISCO, HELLO in 1943.
Her movie career ended in 1945 when Betty Grable replaced her as Hollywood's favorite musical-comedy actress. Her life after Hollywood was charmingly simple. She was married to Hoosier Phil Harris from 1941-1995 in a union that produced two daughters. She had previously been married to Tony Martin for four years.
Alice had always said that her family always came before her professional life. She went back to Hollywood to make STATE FAIR in 1962. At that time she said, "I don't know what happened to the picture business. I'm sorry I went back to find out. Such a shame." Her last film was THE MAGIC OF LASSIE in 1978 opposite Jimmy Stewart. Most of her films are big hits at revival theaters across the country, confirming the power she had in the wonderful performances she gave.
Ironically, Alice is more popular in Britain than in the US. Four days after her birthday on May 9, 1998, Alice Faye died in Rancho Mirage, California of natural causes. She was 83 years old. |
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Additional Alice Faye Biography
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. |
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