fiction.wikisort.org - Actor

Kay Francis (born Katharine Edwina Gibbs; January 13, 1905 – August 26, 1968) was an American stage and film actress.[1] 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 and highest-paid actress at Warner Bros. studio.[2] She adopted her mother's maiden name (Francis) as her professional surname.

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Kay Francis
Francis in 1935
Born	Katharine Edwina Gibbs (1905-01-13)January 13, 1905 Oklahoma City, Oklahoma Territory, U.S.
Died	August 26, 1968(1968-08-26) (aged 63) New York City, U.S.
Occupation	Actress
Years active	1925–1951
Spouse(s)	James Dwight Francis ​ ​ (m. 1922; div. 1925)​ William Gaston ​ ​ (m. 1925; div. 1927)​ Kenneth MacKenna ​ ​ (m. 1931; div. 1934)​

Early life

Kay Francis was born as Katharine Edwina Gibbs in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma Territory (present-day Oklahoma), in 1905, the only child of Katharine Clinton (née Francis), an actress,[3] and Joseph Sprague Gibbs. Her parents wed in 1903. In 1909, Kay's mother left her alcoholic husband, taking their daughter.[3] Kay apparently inherited her 5-foot 9 inch height from her 6 feet 4 inch father, and is believed to have been Hollywood's tallest 1930s female lead actress.^{[citation needed]}

Her mother had been born in Nova Scotia, Canada, and was a moderately successful actress and singer on a hardscrabble theatrical circuit under the stage name Katharine Clinton. Kay often traveled with her mother.[3] Kay attended Catholic schools when it was affordable, becoming a student at the Institute of the Holy Angels at age five.[4] After also attending Miss Fuller's School for Young Ladies in Ossining, New York (1919) and the Cathedral School (1920), she enrolled at the Katharine Gibbs Secretarial School in New York City. While there she did nothing to discourage the assumption that her mother was the pioneering American businesswoman who had established the Gibbs chain of vocational schools.^{[citation needed]}

In 1922, 17-year-old Kay was engaged to and married James Dwight Francis, a well-to-do man from Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Their marriage, at New York's Saint Thomas Church, ended in divorce three years later.[5]

Stage career

In the spring of 1925, Francis went to Paris to get a divorce. While there, she was courted by Bill Gaston, a former athlete at Harvard and member of the Boston Bar Association. They were secretly married in October 1925, though this marriage was short-lived.[6] Francis and Gaston saw each other only on occasion, as he was in Boston and she had decided to follow her mother's footsteps and go on the stage in New York.

She made her Broadway debut[7] as the Player Queen in a modern-dress version of Shakespeare's Hamlet in November 1925.[8] She often "borrowed" wardrobe for fashionable nights out in New York that were reported on by the day's press. Francis claimed she got the part by "lying a lot, to the right people". One of them was producer Stuart Walker, who hired her to join his Portmanteau Theatre Company. She soon found herself commuting between Dayton and Cincinnati, Ohio, and Indianapolis, Indiana. She played wisecracking secretaries, saucy French floozies, walk-ons, bit parts, and heavies.

By February 1927, Francis returned to New York and got a part in the Broadway play Crime.[9] A teenage Sylvia Sidney had its lead, but later said that Francis stole the show.

After Francis' divorce from Gaston in September 1927 she became engaged to a society playboy, Alan Ryan Jr. She promised Ryan's family that she would not return to the stage – a promise that lasted only a few months before she was playing an aviator in a Rachel Crothers play, Venus.[10]

Francis appeared in only one other Broadway production, titled Elmer the Great in 1928.[11] Written by Ring Lardner and produced by George M. Cohan and starring Walter Huston, the play nonetheless flopped. Though flat broke at the time, Francis was unwilling to ask friends for help and instead vowed to "crawl out of this mess herself."[6]

Huston had been impressed by Francis' performance and encouraged her to take a screen test for his new studio, Paramount Pictures, and the film Gentlemen of the Press (1929). Paramount offered her a starting contract of $300 per week for five weeks.[12] Francis made Press and the Marx Brothers film The Cocoanuts (1929) at Paramount's Astoria Studios in Astoria, Queens, New York before moving to Hollywood.[13]

Film career

Major film studios, which had formerly been based in New York, had become well-established in California, and many Broadway actors were enticed to Hollywood to make sound films, including Ann Harding, Aline MacMahon, Helen Twelvetrees, Spencer Tracy, Paul Muni, Barbara Stanwyck, Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Joan Blondell and Leslie Howard.

Signed to a featured players contract with Paramount Pictures, Francis also made the move and created an immediate impression. She frequently co-starred with William Powell, first teaming in Street of Chance (1930) when David Selznick fought for the pairing after having seen Francis briefly in Behind the Make-up (1930), and it worked, as they appeared in as many as six to eight movies per year, making a total of 21 films between 1930 and 1932.[15]

Francis's career flourished at Paramount in spite of a slight, but distinctive rhotacism (she pronounced the letter "r" as "w") that gave rise to the nickname "Wavishing Kay Fwancis". She appeared in George Cukor's "thrillingly amoral comedy" Girls About Town (1931)[16] and 24 Hours (1931). On December 16, 1931, Francis and her co-stars opened the newly constructed art deco Paramount Theatre in Oakland, California, with a gala preview screening of The False Madonna.[17]

In 1932, Francis' career at Paramount changed gears when Warner Bros. promised her star status at a better salary of $4,000 a week. Paramount sued Warner Bros. over the loss.[18] Warner Bros. persuaded both Francis and Powell to join the ranks of their stars, along with Ruth Chatterton. After her first three featured roles had been as a villainess, Francis was given roles with a more sympathetic screen persona such as in The False Madonna, where she plays a jaded society woman who learns the importance of hearth and home when nursing a terminally ill child. After Francis' career skyrocketed at Warner Bros., she was loaned back to Paramount for Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise (1932).[19]

Mainstream successes

From 1932 through 1936, Francis was the queen of the Warner Bros. lot, and increasingly, her films were developed as star vehicles. By 1935, Francis was one of the highest-paid actors, earning a yearly salary of $115,000, dwarfing the $18,000 Bette Davis – who would one day occupy Francis' dressing room – made.[20] From 1930 to 1937 Francis appeared on the covers of 38 film magazines, second only to child sensation Shirley Temple's 138.[21]

Soon after her arrival in Hollywood, she began an affair with actor and producer Kenneth MacKenna, whom she married in January 1931.[5] MacKenna's Hollywood career foundered, having spent more time in New York with the couple's amicable 1933 separation; they divorced in 1934.[22]

Francis frequently played long-suffering heroines, in films such as I Found Stella Parish, 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. As Belinda in Give Me Your Heart (1936) with co-stars George Brent and Roland Young, her performance had "reticence and pathos" and garnered welcoming reviews from The New York Times.[23]

In October 1937, Francis met aviation businessman Raven Freiherr von Barnekow at a party of Countess Dorothy Dentice di Frasso's in Beverly Hills.[24] In March 1938 Louella Parsons reported on their intended marriage and that Francis would retire from films, but by October the two were traveling separately and Francis was still acting; by December Barnekow had returned to Germany.[24]

Francis's clothes horse reputation and statuesque frame often led Warners' producers to concentrate resources on lavish sets and costumes rather than the quality of the storylines, a move designed to appeal to Depression-era female audiences and capitalize on her reputation as the epitome of chic. Eventually, Francis herself became dissatisfied with these vehicles and began openly to feud with Warner Bros., even threatening a lawsuit against them for inferior scripts and treatment.[25] This, in turn, led to her demotion to programmers, such as Women in the Wind (1939), and, in the same year, to the termination of her contract.[26]

"Box Office Poison" and revival

The Independent Theatre Owners Association paid for an advertisement in The Hollywood Reporter in May 1938 that included Francis, along with Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Fred Astaire, Mae West, Katharine Hepburn, and others, on a list of stars dubbed "box office poison".[27] After her release from Warner Bros., she was unable to secure another studio contract. Carole Lombard, who had been a supporting player in Francis's 1931 film Ladies' Man, insisted Francis be cast in her film In Name Only (1939).[28] Francis had a supporting role to Lombard and Cary Grant, and it offered her an opportunity to engage in some serious acting. After this, she moved to supporting parts in other films, playing fast-talking, professional women – holding her own against Rosalind Russell in The Feminine Touch, for example – and mothers opposite rising young stars such as Deanna Durbin.

Francis had one lead role at the end of the decade opposite Humphrey Bogart in the gangster film King of the Underworld, released in 1939. The movie was a remake of Paul Muni's Dr. Socrates (1935), with Francis in the role of a doctor who is forced to treat Bogart's injured gangster character, and then gets caught up with the law. Originally titled Lady Doctor, the film was shelved then retitled Unlawful for reshoots to beef up Bogart's role. By the film's release, Warner Bros. had again changed titles to King of the Underworld while demoting Francis to second billing.[29]

World War II era

With the start of World War II, Francis joined the war effort doing volunteer work with the Naval Aid Auxiliary,[30] where she was named head of the NAA's Hospital Unit.[31] She also performed extensive war-zone touring, first chronicled in the book Four Jills in a Jeep, written by fellow volunteer Carole Landis.[32] It became a popular 1944 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.

At the end of the war, Four Jills was given a four-star production by 20th Century Fox, but still needed distribution through Monogram, and the decade 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.[33] The resulting films Divorce, Wife Wanted, and Allotment Wives had limited releases in 1945 and 1946.

Francis spent the remainder 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 Windy Hill, backed by former Warner Bros. colleague Ruth Chatterton. Declining health, aggravated by an accident in Columbus, Ohio during a tour of State of the Union in 1948 when she was badly burned by a radiator, hastened her retirement from show business.[34] This incident was first reported as a fainting spell brought on by an accidental overdose from pills, with a complication of respiratory infection. Her manager and traveling companion had arrived at Francis' hotel room, and in an attempt to revive the unconscious actress with fresh air, burned her legs on the radiator near the window.[34] She recovered in an oxygen tent at the local hospital; soon retiring from acting and then, public life.[5]

Personal life

Francis married three times: James Dwight Francis (1922–1925); William Gaston (1925–1927); Kenneth MacKenna (1931–1934); and it was erroneously reported by Walter Winchell her third marriage was to screenwriter John Meehan around 1929.[36] She had affairs with Maurice Chevalier and Raven Freiherr von Barnekow.[37]

Her diaries, which are preserved along with her film-related material in an academic collection at Wesleyan University open to scholars and researchers, paint a picture of a woman whose personal life was often in disarray.[35][38] She regularly socialized with gay men, one of whom, Anderson Lawler, was reportedly paid $10,000 by Warner Bros. to accompany her to Europe in 1934, to keep her out of mischief.[39]

In 1966, Francis was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy, but the cancer had already spread. She died in 1968, aged 63. Her body was immediately cremated; according to her will her ashes were to be disposed of "how the undertaker sees fit."[5] Anxious to be forgotten, she wanted neither services nor grave marker.

Having no living immediate family members, Francis left more than $1 million to The Seeing Eye, an organization in New Jersey, which trains guide dogs for the blind.[40]

Filmography

Features

Year	Title	Role	Notes
1929	Gentlemen of the Press	Myra May
1929	The Cocoanuts	Penelope
1929	Dangerous Curves	Zara Flynn
1929	Illusion	Zelda Paxton
1929	The Marriage Playground	Lady Wrench
1930	Behind the Make-Up	Kitty Parker
1930	Street of Chance	Alma Marsden
1930	Paramount on Parade	Carmen	Episode: "The Toreador"
1930	A Notorious Affair	Countess Olga Balakireff
1930	For the Defense	Irene Manners
1930	Raffles	Gwen
1930	Let's Go Native	Constance Cook
1930	The Virtuous Sin	Marya Ivanova Sablin
1930	Passion Flower	Dulce Morado
1930	Paramount on Parade	Herself
1931	Scandal Sheet	Edith Flint
1931	Ladies' Man	Norma Page
1931	The Vice Squad	Alice Morrison
1931	Transgression	Elsie Maury
1931	Guilty Hands	Marjorie West
1931	24 Hours	Fanny Towner
1931	Girls About Town	Wanda Howard
1931	The False Madonna	Tina
1932	Strangers in Love	Diana Merrow
1932	Man Wanted	Lois Ames
1932	Street of Women	Natalie 'Nat' Upton
1932	Jewel Robbery	Baroness Teri
1932	One Way Passage	Joan Ames
1932	Trouble in Paradise	Madame Mariette Colet
1932	Cynara	Clemency Warlock
1933	The Keyhole	Anne Vallee Brooks
1933	Storm at Daybreak	Irina Radovic
1933	Mary Stevens, M.D.	Mary Stevens
1933	I Loved a Woman	Laura McDonald
1933	The House on 56th Street	Peggy Martin
1934	Mandalay	Tanya Borodoff / Spot White / Marjorie Lang
1934	Wonder Bar	Liane
1934	Dr. Monica	Dr. Monica
1934	British Agent	Elena Moura
1935	Living on Velvet	Amy Prentiss
1935	Stranded	Lynn Palmer
1935	The Goose and the Gander	Georgiana
1935	I Found Stella Parish	Stella Parish
1936	The White Angel	Florence 'Flo' Nightingale
1936	Give Me Your Heart	Belinda Warren
1937	Stolen Holiday	Nicole Picot
1937	Another Dawn	Julia Ashton Wister
1937	Confession	Vera Kowalska
1937	First Lady	Lucy Chase Wayne
1938	Women Are Like That	Claire Landin
1938	My Bill	Mary Colbrook
1938	Secrets of an Actress	Fay Carter
1938	Comet Over Broadway	Eve Appleton
1939	King of the Underworld	Carol Nelson
1939	Women in the Wind	Janet Steele
1939	In Name Only	Maida Walker
1940	It's a Date	Georgia Drake
1940	When the Daltons Rode	Julie King
1940	Little Men	Jo
1941	Play Girl	Grace Herbert
1941	The Man Who Lost Himself	Adrienne Scott
1941	Charley's Aunt	Donna Lucia d'Alvadorez
1941	The Feminine Touch	Nellie Woods
1942	Always in My Heart	Marjorie Scott
1942	Between Us Girls	Christine 'Chris' Bishop
1944	Four Jills in a Jeep	Herself
1945	Divorce	Dianne Carter
1945	Allotment Wives	Sheila Seymour
1946	Wife Wanted	Carole Raymond	(final film role)

Short subjects

• Screen Snapshots Series 16, No. 3 (1936) as Herself – Observer
• Show Business at War (1943, Documentary) as Herself (uncredited)

Bibliography

• The Women of Warner Brothers: The Lives and Careers of 15 Leading Ladies with Filmographies for Each (Performing Arts). Daniel Bubbeo. MacFarland & Co., 2001. ISBN 0786411376, ISBN 978-0786411375
• Callahan, Dan, Kay Francis: Secrets of an Actress, Bright Lights Film Journal, May 2006. Retrieved December 4, 2006
• Nemeth, Michael. "Alluring Lady", Classic Images. September 2022
• Kear, Lynn; Rossman, John (2006). Kay Francis: A Passionate Life and Career. McFarland & Company. ISBN 0-7864-2366-8.
• Kear, Lynn; Rossman, John (2007). The Complete Kay Francis Career Record. ISBN 978-1-4766-0287-5.
• O'Brien, Scott (2006). Kay Francis: I Can't Wait to Be Forgotten. BearManor Media. ISBN 1-59393-036-4.
• 1910 United States Federal Census, Fort Lee, Bergen County, New Jersey, Election District 11

References

External links

• Kay Francis at the Internet Broadway Database
• Kay Francis at IMDb
• Kay Francis at the TCM Movie Database
• Kay Francis fan site
• Photographs of Kay Francis
• Kay Francis at Find a Grave
• Kay Francis: 1925 passport photo
• Kay Francis – LA Times
• Kay Francis :The Hollywood Walk of Fame

На других языках

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[de] Kay Francis

Kay Francis, geborene Katherine Edwina Gibbs (* 13. Januar 1905 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; † 26. August 1968 in New York City), war eine US-amerikanische Schauspielerin. Sie war einer der größten und bestbezahlten weiblichen Stars der 1930er Jahre in Hollywood. Kay Francis trat häufig in „woman's pictures“ auf, Filmproduktionen, die gezielt auf die Bedürfnisse und Sehgewohnheiten der weiblichen Zuschauer konzipiert wurden.[1]

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- [en] Kay Francis

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[es] Kay Francis

Kay Francis (Oklahoma City; 13 de enero de 1905 – Nueva York; 26 de agosto de 1968) fue una actriz estadounidense de cine y teatro, enormemente popular en la década de 1930. Su belleza morena y su esbelta figura, la convertirían en todo un referente de elegancia para sus contemporáneos. Tras una breve experiencia teatral en Broadway, Kay Francis inicia su carrera cinematográfica en 1929, contratada por Paramount, alcanzando rápidamente una gran popularidad. En 1932, Warner Brothers le ofrece un lucrativo contrato que la convierte no solamente en la primera estrella femenina del estudio, sino también en la actriz mejor pagada en los Estados Unidos[1]

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[ru] Кэй Фрэнсис

Кэй Фрэнсис (англ. Kay Francis, 13 января 1905 (1905-01-13) — 26 августа 1968) — американская театральная и киноактриса. После недолгой карьеры на Бродвее в конце 1920-х годов открыла для себя карьеру в кино, добившись наибольшего успеха в период с 1930 по 1936 год, будучи при этом звездой № 1 на студии «Warner Bros.», а также самой высокооплачиваемой актрисой США[1].

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