What happened to the Ritz Brothers?
—Cecilia H., Missouri
The vaudeville team of Al, Jimmy and Harry Ritz are all deceased. Al, the oldest of the three died in 1965 of a heart attack, leaving Jimmy and Harry to carry on without him. Jimmy died of heart failure and Harry died of cancer, both within a year of each other in the mid-1980s. They were born in Newark, N.J.—Al in 1901, Jimmy two years later, and Harry in 1906—and raised in Brooklyn, N.Y. After Harry graduated from high school, the brothers took their vaudeville act on the road. Unfortunately, the slapstick trio always lived in the shadows of the Marx Brothers, but they made a mark of their own and broke into films with Hotel Anchovy in 1934.
