
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, May 11, 1990                   TAG: 9005110121
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: B-2   EDITION: STATE 
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
DATELINE: HOLLYWOOD                                LENGTH: Short

CHARLES FARRELL, EARLY ACTOR, DIES

Charles Farrell, whose patrician features placed him among the most luminescent of filmdom's early stars and whose business acumen took him to the barren desert east of Los Angeles where he built a posh tennis club atop scrub brush, has died.

Friends said Thursday that the developer and onetime mayor of Palm Springs had died Sunday at his Palm Springs home but had asked that news of his death not be announced until the funeral.

He was 89 and was buried Wednesday at Welwood Murray Pioneer Cemetery beside his wife, actress Virginia Valli.

He and Janet Gaynor, who died in 1984, were America's most famous film couple in the late 1920s and early '30s when motion pictures first found a voice. But Farrell's popularity declined when his Boston Brahmin enunciations brought him into disfavor with the old Fox Studios front office. Tired, he said years later, of trying to portray James Cagney with an accent more like James Mason's, he left films and, despite the forbidding Great Depression, he and fellow actor Ralph Bellamy in 1934 built two tennis courts on sand drifts and scrub which they then surrounded with a ramshackle board fence.

The endeavor proved so successful that the Charles Farrell Racquet Club was to become not only the setting for his own fortune but for a late 1950s television series that starred Farrell as its owner, dealing with the minor travails of family and staff.

by CNB