Actors - Alice Faye

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	Actors - Alice Faye

Alice Faye (born Alice Jeane Leppert) (May 5, 1915 – May 9, 1998) was a U.S. 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.

Policeman's Daughter to Vaudeville

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.

In Film: From Showgirl to Soft Girl

Meanwhile, she got her first major film break in 1934, when Lillian 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 a singing version of Jean Harlow to a softer tone to her blonde hair and more mature facial makeup. The 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.

From Soft Girl to Musicals Girl

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, in a dual role allowed her to play 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. 1940'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.

Feuding with the Fox

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.

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Actors - Alice Faye

Policeman's Daughter to Vaudeville

In Film: From Showgirl to Soft Girl

From Soft Girl to Musicals Girl

Feuding with the Fox

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