Eddie Fontaine

Eddie Fontaine (March 6, 1927 – April 13, 1992) was an American actor and singer, best known for television roles in the 1960s and 1970s.

Biography

Born Edward Reardon in Springfield, Massachusetts, Fontaine signed as a vocalist with RCA in 1954 after serving in the US Navy. In 1955, he appeared at the Brooklyn Paramount Theater in disc jockey Alan Freed's first rock and roll show. He also sang in the Jayne Mansfield movie, The Girl Can't Help It (1956).[1]

Musically he is best remembered for his 1958 single "Nothin' Shakin' (But the Leaves on the Trees)", which was later covered by The Beatles.[2]

He is listed as a "legend" but not an inductee at the Rockabilly Hall of Fame site.[3]

Fontaine moved to Van Nuys, California, in the 1960s after singing in night clubs in pre-Castro Cuba. He landed a role in the World War II series The Gallant Men, where he played ladies' man PFC Pete D'Angelo and occasionally sang.[4]

Although he never won another regular role in a television series Fontaine made many guest appearances on shows such as 77 Sunset Strip, Baretta, Happy Days, The Rockford Files and Quincy.[5]

In 1984 Fontaine was tried and convicted in a murder-for-hire case. According to police documents, in 1983 Fontaine approached a country singer with the promise of a recording contract with RCA, along with a large sum of money, if the man were to kill his estranged wife, with whom he was having a custody battle at the time. Fontaine was sentenced for four years in a California prison. He had previously been convicted of child molestation and grand larceny. Fontaine appealed his murder-for-hire conviction based on the trial judge's rulings concerning these earlier offenses and won.[6]

He made his last TV appearance in the series Sisters in 1991 and died of throat cancer the following year at age 65 in Roselle, New Jersey. His son, Brian LaFontaine, is a guitarist in Los Angeles.

On June 25, 2019, The New York Times Magazine listed Eddie Fontaine among hundreds of artists whose material was reportedly destroyed in the 2008 Universal fire.[7]

gollark: Mostly the content.
gollark: They do have a memory. It just isn't very good.
gollark: I have a thing to suspend tabs so they don't use RAM/CPU, so theoretically I can go to hyperscale™ quantities of tabs.
gollark: As of now, I have 755 tabs, which is down from 840 last week.
gollark: If anyone continues to be curious, the graphs are mostly at https://stats.osmarks.net/d/rYdddlPWk/general?orgId=1&refresh=1m (should work unauthenticated), there are guides on the arch wiki and such if you want to set this up on a server, and https://github.com/osmarks/autobotrobot/commit/4e1dc6b337110c20e2d194ee5c4517eea0abaea2 contains the integration code.

References
  1. "The Jive Aces Present..."The Girl Can't Help It" (DVD)". Jive Aces. Archived from the original on May 9, 2017. Retrieved September 19, 2010.
  2. Poore, Billy (1998). Rockabilly: A Forty-Year Journey. Retrieved September 19, 2010.
  3. "Rockabilly Hall of Fame Legends List". Retrieved September 19, 2010.
  4. "US Military Series: The Gallant Men". Classic TV Archive. Archived from the original on September 20, 2010. Retrieved September 19, 2010.
  5. "Eddie Fontaine filmography and biography". TorrentReactor. Archived from the original on June 15, 2011. Retrieved September 19, 2010.
  6. O'Shaughnessy, Lynn (June 11, 1985). "Actor Wins Review of His Conviction in Murder Plot". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved September 3, 2010.
  7. Rosen, Jody (June 25, 2019). "Here Are Hundreds More Artists Whose Tapes Were Destroyed in the UMG Fire". The New York Times. Retrieved June 28, 2019.
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