Helen Morgan (née Riggins; August 2, 1900 – October 9, 1941) was an American singer and actress who worked in films and on the stage.

She suffered from bouts of alcoholism, and despite her notable success in the title role of another Hammerstein and Kern's Broadway musical, Sweet Adeline (1929), her stage career was relatively short.

Wodehouse, music by Jerome Kern) and "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man" in two stage runs and two film productions of Show Boat over a span of 11 years.

Her prominence in the world of New York nightclubs (actually illegal speakeasies in the era of Prohibition) led to her fronting a club called Chez Morgan, at which she entertained.

On December 30, 1927, only days after the opening of Show Boat, she was arrested at Chez Morgan for violation of liquor laws.

Charges were dropped in February 1928, and the club reopened as Helen Morgan's Summer Home, but she was arrested again on June 29 and this time indicted.

After appearing in the 1929 film version of Show Boat,[1] she went on to star in Kern and Hammerstein's Broadway musical Sweet Adeline.

She took the role of burlesque star Kitty Darling in Rouben Mamoulian's 1929 classic feature film Applause,[5] with stage act portrayals, as well as a cappella singing in private scenes.

Alcoholism plagued her, and she was hospitalized in late 1940, after playing Julie La Verne one last time in a 1940 Los Angeles stage revival of Show Boat.

[1] She collapsed onstage during a performance of George White's Scandals of 1942 and died in Chicago of cirrhosis of the liver on October 9, 1941.