Ted Healy was an actor-comedian who for a time worked with a trio of low-comedy sidekicks. He'd slap them and smack them and generally abuse them…and I dunno how the act played on vaudeville stages but when they did films, the sidekicks seemed to be the only funny thing about Mr. Healy. Later, they went off their own and were even funnier away from him. That's one of the two reasons everyone knows of The Three Stooges and very few people know of Ted Healy.
The other reason Healy isn't well-known today is that he died in 1937 at the age of just 41. How he died is one of those Hollywood Mysteries. Some accounts say he had a heart attack. Some say he was beaten to death by a group of "college boys" one night in the famed Sunset Strip nightclub, the Trocadero. Some say it wasn't college boys; that the assailants included actor Wallace Berry and also Albert R. Broccoli, who later produced the best James Bond movies. And there are other theories, some involving medical problems other than a heart attack.
For a time, Healy was more famous in Hollywood for dying under mysterious circumstances than he was for anything he did on the screen. None of these is conclusive but the gent behind the blog The Daily Mirror has collected "the story" as told in newspaper accounts at the time. Want to read it? Well, you can start with Part 1 then read Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14 and Part 15. In that order.