Final Acting Years and Death
.
In the mid-60s, the Three Stooges tried their hand at a new comedy show titled The New Three Stooges, a mixture of live and animated segments. While it produced good ratings, they were too old by this point to do slapstick comedy well and Larry also began showing early signs of the stroke that would eventually kill him, such as frequent trouble delivering his lines properly. Returning to work, Fine and the other two Stooges were working on a new TV series entitled Kook's Tour in January 1970 when Larry suffered a debilitating stroke that paralyzed the left side of his body. He eventually moved to the Motion Picture House, an industry retirement community in Woodland Hills, where he spent his remaining years. Even in his paralyzed state, he did what he could to entertain the other patients and was visited regularly by his old partner Moe Howard.
He was confined to a wheelchair during his last five years. Like Curly Howard, Fine suffered several additional strokes before his death on January 24, 1975. He was interred in Glendale's Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in the Freedom Mausoleum, Sanctuary of Liberation.
Fine is sometimes erroneously listed as the father of sportscaster Warner Wolf, who is in fact the son of Jack Wolf, one of several other "stooges" who played in Ted Healy's vaudeville act at one time or another. He is, however, the father-in-law of actor and Los Angeles television personality Don Lamond, best known for hosting Stooges shorts on KTTV for many years.
Read more about this topic: Larry Fine
Famous quotes containing the words final, acting, years and/or death:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”
—Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969)
“Surely, ‘tis one step towards acting well, to think worthily of our nature; and as in common life, the way to make a man honest, is, to suppose him so ... so here, to set some value upon ourselves, enables us to support the character ... of generosity and virtue.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“Unlike Boswell, whose Journals record a long and unrewarded search for a self, Johnson possessed a formidable one. His life in London—he arrived twenty-five years earlier than Boswell—turned out to be a long defense of the values of Augustan humanism against the pressures of other possibilities. In contrast to Boswell, Johnson possesses an identity not because he has gone in search of one, but because of his allegiance to a set of assumptions that he regards as objectively true.”
—Jeffrey Hart (b. 1930)
“When death comes too near, comedy and tragedy fall silent.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)