Madeline Foy, 82; Last Daughter of Seven Little Foys

Madeline Foy, the last surviving daughter of Eddie Foy Sr., the madcap vaudevillian and Broadway musical star who put his seven children on stages around the world, has died.

The next to last surviving member of the Seven Little Foys was 82 when she died July 5 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, her daughter, Madeline Foy O’Donnell Jr. said Tuesday.

Only Irving Foy, now believed to be 78 and living in Albuquerque, N.M., is left of the gang of merry moppets born to Edwin Fitzgerald, a popular comedian and song and dance man in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and his ballerina wife, Madelinda Morando.

They named their five boys and two girls Bryan, Charley, Richard, Irving, Eddie Jr., Mary and Madeline, and Fitzgerald became Eddie Foy. The Seven Little Foys quickly became one of the zaniest and most popular acts in the theater after starting in 1910.

Madeline and the other children toured with the act through the 1920s, but then Eddie Foy Jr. became a solo performer, and the children gradually drifted away into other careers.

“My mother left show business after marrying in the 1930s,” daughter Madeline said.

The family’s life was captured in the 1955 film “The Seven Little Foys” starring Bob Hope and Milly Vitale. Eddie Foy Jr., who died in 1983, was a technical adviser for the picture.

A funeral service for Madeline Foy was held Tuesday at St. Ambrose Roman Catholic Church in Hollywood. She will be buried Friday in the family plot at Holy Sepulcher Cemetery in New Rochelle, N.Y.