Kay_Francis

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Kay Francis

Kay Francis (January 13, –August 26, ) 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 (). 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 ().

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 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 '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' film, Ladies' Man) tried to bolster Francis' career by insisting Francis be cast in In Name Only ().

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 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 and . 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

Short Subjects

Screen Snapshots Series 16, No. 3 (1936)
Show Business at War (1943)

References

Notes

Bibliography

Callahan, John, Kay Francis: Secrets of an Actress, Bright Lights Film Journal, May 2006. Retrieved December 4, 2006
Kear, Lynn & Rossman, John (2006). Kay Francis: A Passionate Life and Career. McFarland & Company. ISBN 0-7864-2366-8.
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 Distrist 11