Kay Francis (January 13, 1905-August 26, 1968) was an American stage and film actress.
After a brief period on Broadway in the late 1920s, she moved to film and achieved her
greatest success between 1930 and 1936, when she was the number one female star at the Warner
Brothers studio, and the highest paid American film actress.
Early life:
Francis was born Katharine Edwina Gibbs in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma Her parents, Joseph Sprague
Gibbs and his actress wife Katharine Clinton Franks, were married on December 3, 1903 in New
York City at the Church of the Transfiguration, and they moved to Oklahoma City the following
year. Joseph Gibbs, who stood 6’4, gave his daughter the gift of height, and she was one of
Hollywood's tallest leading ladies (5 ft 9 in) in the 1930s, along with Alexis Smith and
Ingrid Bergman, but by the time Katharine was four, her father had left.
While she never discouraged rumors that her mother, Katharine ("Kay") Gibbs, was a pioneering
businesswoman who established the "Katharine Gibbs" chain of vocational schools, Francis was
actually raised in the hardscrabble theatrical circuit of the period. Her mother was actually
a moderately successful actress who used the stage name "Katharine Clinton." In later years,
confusion over her origins and upbringing, in tandem with her raven hair and relatively dark
complexion, led to the emergence of rumors that some of her ancestors were African American.
Her mother's maiden name (Franks) led some to believe she was of Jewish descent.
Young Kay was out on the road with her mother, and attended Catholic schools when it was
affordable, such as when she was a student at the Institute of the Holy Angels at age five.
After attending Miss Fuller’s School for Young Ladies in Ossining, New York (1919) and the
Cathedral School (1920), she enrolled at the Katherine Gibbs Secretarial School in New York
City. At age 17, Kay became engaged to a well-to-do Pittsfield, Massachusetts man, James
Dwight Francis. Their December 1922 marriage at New York’s St. Thomas Church was not to last.
Stage career:
In the spring of 1925, Francis went to Paris to get a divorce. While there, she was courted by
a former Harvard athlete and member of the Boston Bar Association, Bill Gaston. Kay and Bill
only saw each other on occasion; he was in Boston and Kay had decided to follow her mother’s
footsteps and go on the stage in New York. She made her Broadway debut] as the Player Queen
in a modern-dress version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in November 1925. Francis claimed she
got the part by lying a lot, to the right people. One of the right people was producer
Stuart Walker, who hired Kay to join his Portmanteau Theatre Company, and she soon found
herself commuting between Dayton, Indianapolis, and Cincinnati, playing wise-cracking
secretaries, saucy French floozies, walk-ons, bit parts, and heavies.
By February 1927, Francis returned to Broadway in the play Crime. Sylvia Sidney, although a
teenager at the time, had the lead in "Crime" but would later say that Kay stole the show.
After Kay’s divorce from Gaston, she became engaged to a society playboy, Alan Ryan Jr. She
promised Alan's family that she would not return to the stage, however, her promise only
lasted a few months and she was back on Broadway as an aviatrix in a Rachel Crothers play,
Venus.
Francis was only to appear in one other Broadway production, a play called Elmer the Great in
1928. Written by Ring Lardner and produced by George M. Cohan, Walter Huston was the star. He
was so impressed by Francis that he encouraged her to take a screen test for the Paramount
Pictures film Gentlemen of the Press (1929). Francis made this film and the Marx Brothers film
The Cocoanuts (1929) at Paramount's Astoria Studios in New York.
Film career:
By that time, film studios had started their exodus from New York to California, and many
Broadway actors had been enticed to travel west to Hollywood to make films, including Ann
Harding, Aline MacMahon, Helen Twelvetrees, Barbara Stanwyck, Humphrey Bogart and Leslie
Howard. Francis, signed to a Paramount contract, also made the move, and created an immediate
impression. She frequently costarred with William Powell, and appeared in as many as six to
eight movies a year, making a total of 21 films between 1929 and 1931.
A combination of striking dark beauty, stature, and a deep, supple voice ideally suited to
early sound-reproduction technology made Francis one of the top film stars of the early 1930s.
So striking were her looks and screen presence that Francis was widely publicized as the
epitome of the "American glamour girl" throughout the 1930s. Her success came in spite of a
minor, but distinct speech impediment (an inability to pronounce the letter "r") that gave
rise to the nickname "Wavishing Kay Fwancis."
Francis' career at Paramount changed gears when Warner Brothers promised her star status at a
better salary. Nonetheless she did some fine portrayals in such films as George Cukor’s
rollicking Girls About Town (1931) and the dark melodrama Twenty-Four Hours (1931). After
Kay’s career skyrocketed at Warners, she would return to Paramount for Ernst Lubitsch's
Trouble in Paradise (1932).
In 1932, Warner Brothers persuaded both Francis and Powell to join the ranks of Warners stars,
along with Ruth Chatterton. In exchange, Francis was given roles that allowed her a more
sympathetic screen persona than had hitherto been the case - in her first three featured roles
she had played a villainess. For example, in The False Madonna (1932), she played a jaded
society woman nursing a terminally ill child who learns to appreciate the importance of hearth
and home.
At the top:
From 1932 through 1936, Francis was the queen of the Warners lot and increasingly her films
were developed as star vehicles. By the mid-thirties, Francis was one of the highest-paid
people in the United States.
Francis had married writer-director John Meehan in New York, but soon after her arrival in
Hollywood, she consummated an affair with actor and producer Kenneth MacKenna, whom she
married in January 1931. When MacKenna's Hollywood career foundered, he found himself
spending more time in New York, and they divorced in 1934.
In the period of her greatest popularity she frequently played long-suffering heroines, in
films such as I Found Stella Parrish, Secrets of an Actress, and Comet over
Broadway, displaying to good advantage lavish wardrobes that, in some cases, were more
memorable than the characters she played -- a fact often emphasized by contemporary film
reviewers. Too frequently, however, Francis' clotheshorse reputation led Warners to
concentrate resources on lavish sets and costumes, designed to appeal to Depression-era female
audiences and capitalize on her reputation as the epitome of chic, rather than on scripts.
Eventually, Francis herself became dissatisfied with these vehicles and began openly to feud
with her employers, even threatening a lawsuit against them for inferior treatment. This in
turn led to her demotion to programmers such as 1939's Women in the Wind and, in the same
year, to the termination of her contract.
Decline:
Some writers have posited that her decline was due to her carelessness about scripts, having
become known for accepting projects rejected by Bette Davis and other stars. Others attribute
it to her basic lack of artistic interest in her career. Many note that, as long as her salary
was paid, she was content to report to whatever film successive studios assigned her.
After her release from Warners, Francis was unable to secure another studio contract. Carole
Lombard, one of the most popular stars of the late 30s and early 1940s (and who had previously
been a supporting player in Francis' 1931 film, Ladies' Man) tried to bolster Francis'
career by insisting Francis be cast in In Name Only (1939).
In this latter film, Francis had a supporting role to Lombard and Cary Grant, but wisely
recognized that the film offered her an opportunity to engage in some serious acting. After
this, she moved to character and supporting parts, playing catty professional women - holding
her own against Rosalind Russell in The Feminine Touch, for example - and as mother to
rising young stars such as Deanna Durbin.
World War II era:
With the start of World War II, Francis plunged into volunteer work, including extensive
war-zone touring, which was first chronicled in a book attributed to fellow volunteer Carole
Landis, "Four Jills in a Jeep". The book became a popular 1943 film of the same name, with a
cavalcade of stars and Martha Raye and Mitzi Mayfair joining Landis and Francis to fill out
the complement of Jills.
Despite the success of Four Jills, the end of the war found Francis virtually unemployable in
Hollywood. She signed a three-film contract with Poverty Row studio Monogram Pictures that
gave her production credit as well as star billing. The results - the films Divorce, Wife
Wanted, and Allotment Wives - had limited releases in 1945 and 1946. While more
lavish than some Monogram productions, they were pale copies of her earlier work.
Francis spent the balance of the 1940s on the stage, appearing with some success in State of the Union and touring in various productions of plays old and new, including one, Windy Hill, backed by former Warners colleague Ruth Chatterton. Declining health, aggravated by an accident in 1948 in which she was badly burned by a radiator, hastened her retirement from show business.
Personal life:
Francis married five times and had numerous well-publicized affairs. Her diaries, preserved
in an academic collection at Wesleyan University, paint a picture of a woman whose personal
life was often in disarray and, at least in published excerpts, emphasize a strong attraction
to men, actors Lee Tracy and Bob Stevens among them.
While some acquaintances paint a lurid picture of a reclusive, hopelessly alcoholic decline
in the 1960s, others describe Francis as content with a quiet life in her comfortable
Manhattan apartment, enjoying the company of a small group of old friends.
In 1966 Francis was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy, but the cancer
had spread and proved fatal. Having no immediate survivors, Francis left over $1,000,000 to a
company, Seeing Eye, Inc., which trained guide dogs for the blind.
Filmography:
Features:
* The Cocoanuts (1929)
* Gentlemen of the Press (1929)
* Dangerous Curves (1929)
* Illusion (1929)
* The Marriage Playground (1929)
* Behind the Make-Up (1930)
* Street of Chance (1930)
* Paramount on Parade (1930)
* A Notorious Affair (1930)
* For the Defense (1930)
* Raffles (1930)
* Let's Go Native (1930)
* The Virtuous Sin (1930)
* Passion Flower (1930)
* Scandal Sheet (1931)
* Ladies' Man (1931)
* The Vice Squad (1931)
* Transgression (1931)
* Guilty Hands (1931)
* 24 Hours (1931)
* Girls About Town (1931)
* The False Madonna (1931)
* Strangers in Love (1932)
* Man Wanted (1932)
* Street of Women (1932)
* Jewel Robbery (1932)
* One Way Passage (1932)
* Trouble in Paradise (1932)
* Cynara (1932)
* The Keyhole (1933)
* Storm at Daybreak (1933)
* Mary Stevens, M.D. (1933)
* I Loved a Woman (1933)
* The House on 56th Street (1933)
* Mandalay (1934)
* Wonder Bar (1934)
* British Agent (1934)
* Living on Velvet (1935)
* Stranded (1935)
* The Goose and the Gander (1935)
* I Found Stella Parish (1935)
* The White Angel (1936)
* Give Me Your Heart (1936)
* Stolen Holiday (1937)
* Another Dawn (1937)
* Confession (1937)
* First Lady (1937)
* Women Are Like That (1938)
* My Bill (1938)
* Secrets of an Actress (1938)
* Comet Over Broadway (1938)
* King of the Underworld (1939)
* Women in the Wind (1939)
* In Name Only (1939)
* It's a Date (1940)
* When the Daltons Rode (1940)
* Little Men (1940)
* Play Girl (1941)
* The Man Who Lost Himself (1941)
* Charley's Aunt (1941)
* The Feminine Touch (1941)
* Always in My Heart (1942)
* Between Us Girls (1942)
* Four Jills in a Jeep (1944)
* Divorce (1945)
* Allotment Wives (1945)
* Wife Wanted (1946)
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