Frances Faye’s showbiz career started at 15 singing and playing piano in nightclubs. She became a nightclub star.

Her act became famous for including double entendres and references to homosexuality and lesbianism. She would often playfully alter pronouns in love songs or weave her girlfriend’s name into lyrics of song.

She appeared in the Bing Crosby film Double or Nothing, singing “After You”.

She wrote the song “Well All Right” recorded by the Andrews Sisters.

Faye made her first record in 1936: “No Regrets” / “You’re Not the Kind of a Boy” (Decca – 1936). She recorded a dozen albums.

She tour into the early 1980s, including Australia.

Peter Allen credited her as a major influence and had Faye sing the backing vocals on the track 9 reprise of “Just a Gigolo” on his 1974 album, Continental American.

She returned to film in 1978, playing an elderly cocaine-sniffing madam in the Louis Malle film Pretty Baby.

In 2008, Nick Christo staged a tribute show to the fabulous Frances Faye. He told the Sydney Morning Herald, “I love Frances Faye’s style of comedy and her no-holds-barred approach,” he says. “She was a strange-looking woman who used that for comic effect … Her music and style of delivery spoke to me as a performer and I wanted to do a show that captured her essence and treated the music as a celebration.”