Addie McPhail

Actress Addie McPhail, last wife and keeper of the flame for silent-movies star Roscoe " Fatty " Arbuckle, the subject of one of Hollywood ' s most infamous murder trials, has died at age 97, associates said.

Miss McPhail died April 14 in Los Angeles of unknown causes. She contended that despite Arbuckle ' s 11-year banishment from Hollywood where he once dominated silent film comedies, he died a happy man on the verge of a comeback.

" I believe Roscoe died happy, " she told Britain ' s Guardian newspaper in 2000. " He was with a girl who loved him and Hollywood had forgiven him and welcomed him back. "

She married Arbuckle in 1932, when she was 25 and he was 45. The rotund comic ' s career had been toppled a decade earlier when he was charged with murdering actress Virginia Rappe, who suffered a ruptured bladder and died from an infection days after attending a party in Arbuckle ' s hotel room.

Arbuckle was tried three times and acquitted, with the jury finding that " a great injustice " had been done to the comedian. Nonetheless, he couldn ' t find work in front of the camera, so he began directing short comic films. He met Miss McPhail in 1930 when directing her in the film " Up A Tree. "

Her union with Arbuckle lasted only a year he died of a heart attack at 46 in a New York hotel the night they celebrated their first anniversary, and his new contract offer to appear in a feature-length film.

Miss McPhail continued her career, which included nearly two dozen films such as " The Big Palooka, " and " Midnight Daddies, " by 1932. She appeared in a few more films before retiring in 1940.

" It was over for me, " Miss McPhail told the Guardian . " I don ' t believe I ever did anything spectacular enough in pictures or on the stage to be remembered for it. I was like a small ship passing through a rough sea. "

She worked into her 90s as a volunteer nurse at a retirement facility in Los Angeles for film industry folk.