LesterFester — 12 years ago(January 12, 2014 12:32 PM)

Watertown Daily Times, Saturday, January 25, 1975
LARRY FINE, LAST OF ORIGINAL THREE STOOGES DIES AT 73
LOS ANGELES (AP) Larry fine the wild-haired Member of the Three Stooges slapstick comedy team, is dead at 73.
Find died of a stroke Friday at the Motion Picture County Home in nearby Woodland Hills. He had been a resident there since 1971, when a series of strokes left him partially paralyzed.
Fine, who was unable to walk, had continued to make appearances at schools and on television talk shows, reminiscing about his 50 years as one of the Stooges.
Fine was the Stooge in the middle, wild-haired and wearing a perplexed expression. The original team included Fine and two brothers, Moe Howard, mop-haired and wiley, and Curly Howard, chubby and vulnerable.
Curly died in 1952 and was replaced by another brother, Shemp Howard, who died in 1955. Shemp's successors was Joe Besser and Joe de Rita.
By 1959, the market for the Stooges' fare, short comedies, had vanished and it appeared there career was ended. But the team enjoyed a rebirth as a new generation discovered its short comedies on television.
Although they earned no money from the TV showings, the Stooges were in demand again for personal appearances and such future films as "Snow White and the Three Stooges" and "The Three Stooges meet Hercules."
Fine, born in Philadelphia, entered vaudeville in 1916. He played the fiddle in an act called the Haney Sisters and that until he met Ted Healey in 1925. He joined the Howard brothers as plants in the audience who heckled Healey.
They entered films in 1930 as Ted Healey and His Stooges. The name came from the term "stoogeing," which means aiming a palm at another's forehead.
They were in such films as "Soup to Nuts," "Dancing Lady," "The Band Plays On" and "Mad Love" before Healey left to become a straight actor. Shemp left the act and the remaining stooges moved from MGM to Columbia Studios, where they made 218 comedy shorts in 24 years..
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