THE TALENTS OF JIM BAILEY

Female impersonator Jim Bailey’s onstage portrayals of famous entertainers were so uncanny — not just their voices but also the mannerisms, costumes and hairdos — that sometimes people thought they were seeing the actual women. There was once one couple in Las Vegas, seeing Mr. Bailey in his signature role as Judy Garland, took it a step further. The audience was from a plumber’s convention, wrote Bruce Vilanch in a 1997 article for the Advocate magazine. One plumber turned to his wife and said, "I thought she was dead." ‘She is,’ the wife replied, "This is the daughter."

 

Mr. Bailey, 77, last year when he passed away  on May 30 at a hospital in Los Angeles. The cause was a heart attack brought on by pneumonia.  He had been a Las Vegas staple and appeared on numerous television shows beginning in the 1970s, including “The Ed Sullivan Show” (as Garland, singing “The Man That Got Away”), “The Carol Burnett Show” (as Barbra Strei­sand, singing a duet with Burnett), “Here’s Lucy” (as Phyllis Diller), and (numerous times) “The Tonight Show. He did live, full-length concerts as his characters at major venues such as Carnegie Hall, the London Palladium and the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, where he appeared in 1972 as Garland and Streisand. I can't get enough of this guys talented acts!