Kay Francis

At 63 years old, Kay Francis has this physical status:

Katherine Edwina "Kay" Francis (née Gibbs, January 13, 1905 – August 26, 1968) was an American stage and film actress.

After a brief stint on Broadway in the late 1920s, she migrated to film and had her best success between 1930 and 1936, when she was the most well-paid American film actress.

Early life

In 1905, Katharine Edwina Gibbs, the only child of Katharine Clinton (née Francis), an actress, and Joseph Sprague Gibbs, respectively, were born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma Territory (present-day Oklahoma). In 1903, her parents wed in 1903. Kay's mother died in 1909 after her alcoholic husband abandoned their child. Kay is reported to have inherited her 5-foot-9 inch height from her 6 foot 4 inch father and is expected to have been Hollywood's tallest female lead actress in 1930s.

Her mother was born in Nova Scotia, Canada, and under the stage name Katharine Clinton, she was a moderately successful actress and singer on a rocky Broadway circuit. Kay and her mother used to travel together. Kay attended Catholic schools as it was cheap, and at age five, she began attending the Institute of the Holy Angels. She began attending Miss Fuller's School for Young Ladies in Ossining, New York (1919) and the Cathedral School (1920), and later, she attended the Katharine Gibbs Secretarial School in New York City. While she was on display, she did nothing to debunk the belief that her mother was the pioneering American businesswoman who had founded the Gibbs chain of vocational schools.

In 1922, a 17-year-old Kay was engaged to and married James Dwight Francis, a well-to-do man from Pittsfield, Massachusetts. The couple's union, which took place at Saint Thomas Church in New York City, ended in divorce three years later.

Personal life

Francis married three times: James Dwight Francis (1922–1925); William Gaston (1925–1937); Kenneth MacKenna (1931–1934); Walter Winchell, 1934–1934); and finally, it was reported by Walter Winchell that his third marriage was to screenwriter John Meehan around 1929. She had affairs with Maurice Chevalier and Raven Freiherr von Barnekow.

Her diaries, which are preserved in a Wesleyan University academic collection containing scholars and researchers, paint a picture of a woman whose personal life was often disarray. She performed regularly with gay people, 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.

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

Since there are no living families in the family, Francis left more than $1 million to The Seeing Eye, an organization in New Jersey that provides guide dogs to the blind.

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Stage career

Francis went to Paris in the spring of 1925 to get a divorce. Bill Gaston, a former Harvard athlete and board member of the Boston Bar Association, convicted her while she was on trial there. They were secretly married in October 1925, but their marriage was short-lived. As he was in Boston, Francis and Gaston met together on occasion, but she had to follow her mother's footsteps and go on the stage in New York.

In a modern-dress interpretation of Shakespeare's Hamlet in November 1925, she made her Broadway debut as Player Queen. She often "borrowed" clothes for fashionable nights out in New York that were not announced by the day's papers. "I'm lying a lot, to the right people," Francis said. Stuart Walker, one of them, was recruited to work with Portmanteau Theatre Company. She soon discovered herself commuting between Dayton and Cincinnati, Ohio, and Indianapolis, Indiana. She starred wisecracking spies, saucy French floozies, walk-ons, bit parts, and heavies.

Francis returned to New York in February 1927 and appeared in the Broadway play Crime. A teen Sylvia Sidney had a lead, but then discovered that Francis stole the show.

After Francis' divorce from Gaston in September 1927, she became engaged to Alan Ryan Jr., a playboy whose participation in a Rachel Crothers play, Venus.

In 1928, Francis appeared in only one other Broadway performance, titled Elmer the Great. The play, written by Ring Lardner and produced by George M. Cohan and starring Walter Huston, flopped. Despite the fact that the apartment was broken at the time, Francis was unable to ask for help and instead promised to "crawl out of this mess herself."

Francis' performance had piqued her interest, causing her to take a screen test for his new studio, Paramount Pictures, and the film Gentlemen of the Press (1929). For five weeks, For five weeks, For five weeks, Paraphrased At Astoria, Queens, New York, we filmed Press and the Marx Brothers film The Cocoanuts (1929), before going to Hollywood.

Film career

Many Broadway actors had been encouraged to Hollywood to make sound films, including Ann Harding, Aline MacMahon, Helen Twelvetrees, Spencer Tracy, Paul Muni, Barbara Stanwyck, James Cagney, Leslie Howard, and Leslie Howard.

Francis, who was signed to a Paramount Pictures featured player contract, made the switch and made an immediate impression. Since appearing in as many as six to eight films per year between 1930 and 1932, she regularly co-starred with William Powell, first teaming in Street of Chance (1930), and it paid off, as she appeared in as many as six to eight films per year.

Despite a modest, but distinct rhotacism (he pronounced the letter "w") that gave rise to the term "Wavishing Kay Fwancis," Francis' career flourished at Paramount. Girls About Town (1931) and 24 Hours (1931) She appeared in George Cukor's "thrillingly amoral comedy" Girls About Town (1931). With a gala preview screening of The False Madonna, Francis and her co-stars opened the newly constructed art deco Paramount Theatre in Oakland, California, on December 16, 1931.

When Warner Bros. promised her actresses a higher salary of $4,000 a week in 1932, Francis' career at Paramount changed gear. Warner Bros. was sued over the death. Both Francis and Powell were encouraged to join the ranks of their actors, as well as Ruth Chatterton. After her first three television appearances as a villainess, Francis was given roles in The False Madonna, where she portrays a jaded society woman who learns the importance of hearth and home when caring for a terminally ill child. After Francis' career soared at Warner Bros., she was loaned back to Paramount for Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise (1932).

Francis was the queen of the Warner Bros. lot from 1932 to 1936, and her films became more popular. Francis was one of the highest-paid actors to make $115,000 a year, much less than the $18,000 Bette Davis – who would one day occupy Francis' dressing room – made. From 1930 to 1937, Francis appeared on the front pages of 38 film magazines, second only to child superstar Shirley Temple's 138.

She began an affair with actor and director Kenneth MacKenna, whom she married in January 1931, right after her arrival in Hollywood. MacKenna's Hollywood career was discovered after spending more time in New York with the couple's amicable 1933 separation; they divorced in 1934.

In films such as I Found Stella Parish, Secrets of an Actress, and Comet Over Broadway, Francis often played long-suffering heroines, demonstrating a greater use lavish costumes that, in some cases, were more memorable than the characters she played, a point that has been often emphasized by contemporary film reviewers. The New York Times praised Belinda's appearance in "Give Me Your Heart (1936), co-star George Brent and Roland Young.

Raven Freiherr von Barnekow, an aviation businessman from Barnekow, attended Countes Dorothy Dentice di Frasso's in Beverly Hills in October 1937. In March 1938, Louella Parsons announced that they were planning their wedding and that Francis would retire from film, but by October, the two were traveling separately and Francis was still acting; by December Barnekow had returned to Germany.

Warners' editors often directed attention on lavish sets and costumes rather than the storylines, in an attempt to appeal to Depression-era female audiences and cash out on her reputation as the epitome of chic. Francis herself became dissatisfied with these machines and began to compete with Warner Bros. She even filed a lawsuit against them for inferior scripts and treatment. She was promoted to programmers, such as Women in the Wind (1939), and, in the same year, her employment was terminated.

On a list of actors dubbed "box office poison," the Independent Theatre Owners Association paid for an advertisement in The Hollywood Reporter in May 1938 that included Francis, Joan Crawford, Fred Astaire, Mae West, Katharine Hepburn, and others. She was unable to find another studio job after being released from Warner Bros. Carole Lombard, a supporting actor in Francis' 1931 film Ladies' Man, had a nagging role in her film In Name Only (1939), the Catholic actress. Francis had a supporting role in Lombard and Cary Grant, and it gave her a chance to participate in some serious acting. Following this, she went on to support roles in other films, including fast-talking, career women like Rosalind Russell in The Feminine Touch, for example, and mothers against rising young stars such as Deanna Durbin.

Francis was only leading role in the gangster film King of the Underworld, released in 1939. Humphrey Bogart was his complicity Bogart. The film was a recreation of Paul Muni's Dr. Socrates (1935), with Francis in the role of a doctor who is compelled to treat Bogart's injured gangster character and then getting caught up with the statute. The film, originally named Lady Doctor, was shelved but then retitled Unlawful for reshoots to expand Bogart's role. Warner Bros. had changed names to King of the Underworld by the film's release, while demoting Francis to second billing was still on second place.

Francis became a member of World War II and served in volunteer service with the Naval Aid Auxiliary, where she was named head of the NAA's Hospital Unit at the start of World War II. Carole Landis, a fellow volunteer, did extensive war zone touring, first chronicled in the book Four Jills in a Jeep. It was a well-known 1944 film of the same name, with a cavalcade of actors and Martha Raye and Mitzi Mayfair joining Landis and Francis to round out the number of Jills.

Four Jills was given a four-star production by 20th Century Fox, but Monogram and Monogram weren't available, and the decade found Francis virtually uncomprehensible in Hollywood. She also received honors for her casting and actor billing when she signed a three-film deal with Poverty Row studio Monogram Pictures. In 1945 and 1946, the resulting films Divorce, Wife Wife, and Allotment Wives had limited availability.

Francis spent the remainder of the 1940s on stage, performing with some success in State of the Union and touring in various productions of plays, including former Warner Bros. colleague Ruth Chatterton. Declining health, which was exacerbated by a collision in Columbus, Ohio, during a tour of State of the Union in 1948, when she was badly burned by a radiator, hasn't stopped showing off. This was the first time a fainting spell was triggered by an accidental overdose of medications, which resulted in a respiratory disease complication. Her boss and traveling companion had arrived in Francis' hotel room, and in an attempt to revive the unconscious actress with fresh air, she burned her legs on the radiator outside the window. She recovered in an oxygen tent at the local hospital, and then moved to acting and then public life.

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