Georgia Engel

popular name: Virginia Valli

date_of_death: September 24, 1968

age: 73

cause_of_death: Stroke

claim_to_fame: Show Business

best_know_for: Virginia Valli was an American stage and film actress whose motion picture career started in the silent film era and lasted until the beginning of the sound film era of the 1930s. Valli was an established star at the Universal studio by the mid-1920s. In 1924 she was the female lead in King Vidor's southern gothic Wild Oranges, a film now recovered from film vault obscurity. She also appeared in the romantic comedy, Every Woman's Life, about "the man she could have married, the man she should have married and the man she DID marry." Most of her films were made between 1924 and 1927, and included Paid to Love (1927), with William Powell, and Evening Clothes (1927), which featured Adolphe Menjou. In 1925, Valli performed in The Man Who Found Himself with Thomas Meighan. Never a top star, but always busy, Valli had made over 30 films by 1928 and had co-starred with many important leading men, including Bert Lytel, Lon Chaney, Milton Sills, Thomas Meighan, George O’Brien, and Lloyd Hughes. In addition to Wild Oranges, Valli's other standout films include The Signal Tower (1924), directed by Clarence Brown, costarring Rockcliffe Fellowes and Wallace Beery, and The Pleasure Garden (1925), an early film by director Alfred Hitchcock, made in England for Gainsborough Studios.

popular name: Alice Faye

date_of_death: May 9, 1998

age: 83

cause_of_death: Stomach cancer

claim_to_fame: Show Business

best_know_for: Although may be a little forgotten after all these years, Alice Faye was one of the few movie stars to walk away from stardom at the peak of her career in the 1940s. Ms. Faye's warm, husky contralto and demure sexuality in ''Tin Pan Alley,'' ''Hello, Frisco, Hello'' and ''Alexander's Ragtime Band'' made her one of Hollywood's top 10 moneymaking stars in 1938 and 1939. Under contract to 20th Century Fox for a little over a decade, during which she made 32 movies, Ms. Faye walked out in 1945 after Darryl Zanuck, the studio's leader, chopped up her scenes in ''Fallen Angel'' to highlight the performance of a younger Fox star, Linda Darnell. While an accomplished actress with such film hits as In Old Chicago, Rose of Washington Square and Lillian Russell, she was also a talented singer. Irving Berlin was once quoted as saying that he would choose Faye over any other singer to introduce his songs, and George Gershwin and Cole Porter called her the "best female singer in Hollywood in 1937". During her years as a musical superstar (from the 1930s to the early 1940s), Alice Faye managed to introduce 23 songs to the Hit Parade and was the first female crooner and equivalent to Bing Crosby. In May 1941, she married bandleader Phil Harris. Their marriage, one of the most successful in Hollywood, became a plotline in the hit radio comedy, The Jack Benny Program, where for 16 years Harris was a regular cast member. in 1946. The Harrises' gently tart comedy sketches made them the show's stars. By 1948 the show became a strictly situation comedy with a music interlude each from husband and wife and was renamed The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show.

popular name: Phil Harris

date_of_death: August 11, 1995

age: 91

cause_of_death: Heart attack

claim_to_fame: Show Business

best_know_for: Phil Harris, the brash, bourbon-swigging, fast-drawling band leader who became a comic radio star as a Jack Benny sidekick in the 1930's and then enchanted new generations of fans as the unlikely voice of Baloo the Bear in Walt Disney's "Jungle Book". A talented American actor, comedian, singer and songwriter, voice actor, orchestra leader and a pioneer in radio situation comedy, he was married to his equally lovely and talented wife actress Alice Faye. Whether as part of the famous Jack Benny radio ensemble from 1936 to 1952 or as the star of his own show from 1946 to 1954 with his wife, Alice Faye -- a major star of movie musicals in the 1930's and 40's -- Mr. Harris, with his dark curly hair, wide, toothy grin and trademark "Hi ya, Jackson," was the epitome of the slang-slinging, wise-cracking slacker, a drummer given to one-line quips and two fingers of bourbon.