Alice Faye - End of Motion Picture Career

End of Motion Picture Career

As Faye's star continued to ascend during the war years, family life became more important to her, especially with the arrival of a second daughter, Phyllis. After her birth, Faye signed a new contract with Fox to make only one picture a year, with the option of a second one, in order to give Faye a chance to spend more time with her family. But Faye also used this as an opportunity to campaign for serious roles, turning down numerous scripts in the process.

Faye finally accepted the lead role 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.

According to her obituary in the New York Times, "Ms. Faye handed the keys to her dressing room to the studio gate guard and drove off the lot." In 1987 she told an interviewer, "When I stopped making pictures, it didn't bother me because there were so many things I hadn't done. I had never learned to run a house. I didn't know how to cook. I didn't know how to shop. So all these things filled all those gaps."

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. Ironically, for several years after, Zanuck tried to bring Faye back onto the screen with major roles in films such as The Dolly Sisters, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, The Razor's Edge, and Wabash Avenue, which would give her the chance to work opposite her husband, Phil Harris.

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, most notable playing a secretary in the critically panned all-star flop, Won Ton Ton, the Dog Who Saved Hollywood, in 1976.