Last May 5, I joined in the Tyrone Power centenary celebration with a Power-Mad Blogathon post about Power’s three films opposite Alice Faye, In Old Chicago (1937), Alexander’s Ragtime Band (1938) and Rose of Washington Square (1939). One year later and, unless I missed the call, there is no Blogathon celebrating Alice Faye’s centenary.
Faye was born Alice Jeane Leppert in New York, May 5, 1915. Here’s a summary of the 1915 New York State census that records her as 29 days old. When she legally changed her name in December 1935, she claimed she’d been using the Alice Faye stage name since she was 13:
Clipped from the Philadelphia Inquirer, December 8, 1935, page 25.
I’m especially fascinated by beginnings and endings when discussing the old-time film stars, so here’s a 1933 Louella Parsons clipping announcing Alice Faye’s first movie break:
Found in the Philadelphia Inquirer, December 21, 1933, page 12.
Both Inquirer clippings were discovered through the Old Fulton NY Post Card Website.
And here’s a link to the Alice Faye obituary published by the New York Times in 1998. Faye died of cancer just four days after her 83rd birthday.
After a brief marriage to Tony Martin, Alice Faye was married to bandleader and radio personality Phil Harris for over fifty years until his death in 1995. For a colorful look at the pair together, see this 1950 Lucky Strikes ad I posted a few years ago (by the way, there’s a large gallery of Alice Faye photos a little further down that page).
Above is a circa 1934-35 Fox premium photo depicting the early Alice Faye image: a sultry siren briefly touted as Fox’s answer to Jean Harlow. Below is a shot from later in the decade portraying the more wholesome Faye, a gigantic movie star in her own right who by then didn’t need to have her image associated with anyone beyond Alice Faye.
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