Actors - Kay Francis

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	Actors - Kay Francis

Kay Francis (13 January 1905 - 26 August 1968) was an American actress who, after a brief beginning on Broadway in the 1920s, moved to film and achieved her greatest success between 1930 and 1936.

Early Life

Francis was born Katharine Edwina Gibbs on January 13, 1905, in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. While she never discouraged rumors that her mother, Katherine 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 a moderately successful actress who used the stage name 'Katharine Clinton'.

Career Discovery

A combination of striking dark beauty (albeit of a kind tied to the period of her greatest success), height (5'9") and a deep, supple voice ideally suited to early sound-reproduction technology made Francis one of the top film stars of the early 1930s.

Her success came in spite of a minor but distinct speech impediment that gave rise to the nickname "Wavishing Kay Fwancis." She appeared in many films between 1929 and 1946, when she retired from film acting after years of turbulence, studio mistreatment, and decreasing public favor.

Career Highlights

Highlights of her career including the films The Cocoanuts
(with the Marx Brothers in their screen debut), the hugely acclaimed Trouble in Paradise
(directed by Ernst Lubitsch), Jewel Robbery, and One Way Passage. She frequently played longsuffering heroines (in films with titles such as I Found Stella Parrish, Secrets of an Actress, and Comet over Broadway) who went from rags to riches (or vice versa), displaying to good advantage lavish wardrobes that, in some cases, are more memorable than the characters she played.

She was more versatile than she is sometimes given credit for, playing everything from a physician (in Doctor Monica) to a Russian spy (in British Agent). Many felt she overreached in attempting to portray Florence Nightingale in The White Angel (1936), which marked the end of her greatest popularity.

Career Decline

While she was for a time one of the best-paid people in the United States, her career waned in the late 1930s.

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 her salary was paid, she was content to report to whatever film successive studios assigned her (even when she co-starred with Elsie, the Borden Cow in a film version of Little Men that bears only passing resemblance to Louisa May Alcott's classic). It is also possible that increasingly heavy drinking played a role.

She moved to character and supporting parts, playing catty professional women (in films such as the classic In Name Only and, holding her own against Rosalind Russell, The Feminine Touch), and as mother to rising stars such as Deanna Durbin.

World War II Era

With the start of World War II, she 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, and then in a popular 1943 film of the same name (in which a cavalcade of stars appeared, along with Martha Raye and Mitzi Mayfair filling 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 Monogram Pictures that gave her production credit as well as star billing. The results — films called Divorce, Wife Wanted, and Allotment Wives — had limited releases in 1945 and 1946. While more lavish than some Monogram productions, they are still at best pale copies of her earlier work.

Francis spent the balance of the 1940s on the stage, appearing with some success on Broadway in State of the Union and touring in various productions of plays old and new, including one, Windy Hill, backed by former Warners colleague, star Ruth Chatterton. Declining health, aggravated by an accident in which she was badly burned by a radiator, hastened her retirement.

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