Burns and Allen of the Academy Awards, a record that would remain until Jessica Tandy won an Oscar for "Driving Miss Daisy" in 1989. Burns, who became a centenarian in 1996, continued to work until just weeks before his death of cardiac arrest on March 19, 1996, at his home in Beverly Hills. In 1929 Burns and Allen made their debut radio performance broadcast in London on the BBC. In the United States, they had failed at a 1930 NBC audition. After a solo appearance by Gracie on Eddie Cantor's radio show, they were heard together on Rudy Vallee's "The Fleischmann's Yeast Hour"
Driving Miss Daisy (play) nursing home for increasing memory loss; but is lucid enough to tell Hoke, who has come to visit her, that he is her best friend. The play was inspired by Alfred Uhry's grandmother, Lena Fox, her chauffeur, Will Coleman, and his father. His grandmother, a Jewish woman who lived in Atlanta during the 1960s, had to give up driving after a car accident, and hired Coleman, who drove her for 25 years. Uhry wrote his "Atlanta Trilogy" based on his own experiences living in Atlanta as a Jew. He set his three plays at "historic moments in the city’s twentieth